What is the crowd's opinion of Xiki?

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Try the first video on the screencasts page. It is more explicit about the underlying principles.

To sum it up: Xiki seems to be a command shell, more capable and usable than Bash on a TTY.

• Xiki commands can be ran "anywhere". In your terminal, this means in any line, not just where the prompt is. You just write a prompt in the middle of where you want to run your command, then run the command. You can also use you text editor to run Xiki commands, though I'm not sure how this works.

• The results of Xiki commands are collapseable, editable, and interactive. It's not just a text output that you can at best pipe into another command. Imagine for instance an ls command where the result is some kind of text based file browser.

• "Anything" can be a command. Xiki recognizes stuff that's not normally considered to be a command: A URL could be recognized as a command that open your default web browser. A file path could be recognized as a command that fires up a file browser (possibly a text-based one). A date could be recognized as a command that fires up a calendar or something.

• You can make your own commands. Well, that one is just like Bash. Xiki is supposed to make it very easy for you to create more commands.

• Xiki is not exclusively text based. It allows some GUI-style interaction, apparently without sacrificing the language side of the CLI. You can point, but you don't grunt.

homepage page and github, because no links could be found in the youtube video.

installation instructions:

install ruby 1.9.3; then

$ git clone git://github.com/trogdoro/xiki.git $ cd xiki $ sudo gem install bundler # <- no "sudo" if using rvm $ sudo bundle # <- no "sudo" if using rvm $ sudo ruby etc/command/copy_xiki_command_to.rb /usr/bin/xiki

# Or, if you're using rvm... $ ruby etc/command/copy_xiki_command_to.rb /usr/local/bin/xiki

As an aside; ctrl+d for dropdown menu!? I mean, sure, d for dropdown. But historically ctrl+d was/is kill shell. This is going to mess with my muscle memory.

If it catches on, I'm sure things like that will get fixed. Or submit a pull request with fixes yourself.

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I'm just glad the state of the art for shells in the Unix world isn't fixed at bash/csh/zsh. I played with Xiki Shell for a bit and couldn't get into it ( http://xiki.org/ ).

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And by far I would have to say http://xiki.org/

Honestly, I don't really know enough to answer your question well, but I'll give it a shot.

It sounds like you want a shell with enough on-screen help in the form of menus and breadcrumbs to help keep track of where you are and help you discover new commands.

In theory, one could implement that in the terminal emulator - i.e. detect that a shell is running, scrape the current working directory and changes to it and offer a breadcrumb and menu structure. It would be a bit of a kludge, but it could be done.

As for the best way for someone to do that, I don't know.

SIde note, there's a tool called Xiki, still in development that has a similar goal: http://xiki.org/ I haven't tried it myself, but it looks cool...IDK how that will translate into usability.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think the of this tool idea is fundamentally bad. I could see your kind of alias accumulation getting in the way of tab-completion (assuming you always loaded them into your shell), not to mention having to come up with a name for each new one and accidentally re-using names without realizing it.

This tool is sort of somewhere between your alias approach and xiki (which I do think is over-engineered).

Personally I'm using fzf to (mostly) solve this problem for me. It's way more powerful than your standard reverse history search.

Usually as far as terminal emulation, they all more or less do the same thing -- running shell commands. In terms of interacting with the shell, they all work exactly the same way. Most of the differences I've seen lie in the GUI itself -- things like tabs, a background image, the ability to view images in the console, tmux-styled panes, copying and pasting, etc. The other one is usually support for more character sets, like Unicode, or for multiple languages.

The only exception to this that I've found is xiki, which allows you to do all sorts of things in the terminal, like click links, create your own menus, click on directory paths and navigate them like a file manager, edit the output, run code from languages like ruby, etc. It has tons of bells and whistles, but none that are absolutely necessary.

Truth be told, the reason there are so many different terminal emulators has less to do with features and more to do with which GUI toolkit it's built with, which desktop environment it was built for, etc. Also, it's not that difficult to write your own, so lots of people do it.