seperate the command language and interactive she
Thomas Bellman
bellman at lysator.liu.se
Mon Apr 22 02:49:23 AEST 1991
gudeman at cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
> Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that many of the Unix
> shells combine two seperable functions: the command language and the
> interactive shell. Is there some advantage to this? It seems to me
> that there would be several advantages to seperating them.
> (1) users would have more options. They would not have to pick the
> shell that gives them the best command-line editing even though they
> don't like the control structure syntax. [...]
> (2) the features of the interactive shell could be used for other
> programs. [...]
> (3) related to (2), programs that present virtual terminals (like
> xterm and emacs) could have a complete window-editing environment
> without having to load those functions for the shell as well.
> (4) the command language program could be smaller, possibly giving
> faster startup for system() calls.
I think this would be good. The proper way to do it, would be to have
a smarter cooked mode AND let the user load his own cooked mode
library. To do this in current Unices I think would be difficult.
The only problem is if you want some key interact specially with the
underlying program. E g in BASH, you can press ESC ctrl-e to expand
all variables, aliases and backquote expressions in the line, so you
can edit the result. I don't have any ideas for how to do this, but
it's something I would like to do.
Personally, I don't like the idea of having different historys for
different programs, since I often do something in one program, and
then want to use what I wrote there, in the shell. But that could
easily be remedied by switching to another cooked mode library.
--
Thomas Bellman, Lysator Computer Club ! "Make Love - Nicht Wahr"
Linkoping University, Sweden ! "Too much of a good thing is
e-mail: Bellman at Lysator.LiU.Se ! WONDERFUL." -- Mae West
More information about the Comp.unix.shell
mailing list