Meet Carla Shroder's New Favorite GUI-Textmode Hybrid Shell, Xiki

New submitter trogdoro (3716731) writes with an excerpt from Linux Cookbook author Carla Schroder's enthusiastic introduction to what looks like a tempting tool, combining elements of GUI and text-mode interfaces: Command-line lovers, allow me to introduce you to Xiki, the incredibly interactive, flexible, and revolutionary command shell. I do not use the word "revolutionary" lightly. The command shell has not advanced all that much since the ancient days of Unix. Xiki is a giant leap forward. If you're looking for the Next Big Thing in FOSS, Xiki is it. It's not the first tool meant to combine text and graphic interface, but from the screencast demo, Xiki looks like it gets a lot of things right.

Re:Ho.. hum

[trogdoro]

Indeed. It's been out there, and I've been doing live demos of it for years. At RubyConf, QCon, Strange Loop, and about 20 usergroup presentations. The problem is the installer sucks, and people are confused by how to start using it, which the Kickstarter is meant to address. I'm going to post a new video showing some progress on addressing the latter issue very soon.

Re:What's old is new again ...

[trogdoro]

There's a simple metaphor of "text-in, text-out" that xiki stays true to. It interacts with shell commands, scripts, text files, just about anything. You can call a shell command directly, wrap some lightweight code around it let its output be interactive, or wrap a full script around it. > it is rarely intended to be used by the shell itself I'm going to be post a new video very soon showing a new way of jumping quickly back and forth between your standard shell and Xiki, and making them work together, which I think is a missing piece that solves some of the awkwardness you allude to. I wish I'd gotten it out there before this thread!

Re:Xiki Sucks..

[smallfries]

Also I went through a phase of doing most of this inside vim anyway. It was a time when I was doing a lot of string manipulation in bash with long complex pipelines and I needed to explicitly show the state / track the output of each component.

In vim you just need to keep a :r! at the beginning of each command line, to execute just check that you are in command mode with esc then select the cmd line and middle click to execute, allows piping in results by selecting the input and dropping the r to get :!. There is no support for custom hit regions for the mouse, but in compensation it works everywhere already.

If you already use vim, then having access to vim motions and commands to edit output makes for a surprisingly good shell.

Re:Oberon?

[ttucker]

His point is: learn to fucking spell "Oberyn"

That is an uncivil response to a simple error.