From coff at tuhs.org Sun Nov 2 20:25:00 2025 From: coff at tuhs.org (Lars Brinkhoff via COFF) Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2025 10:25:00 +0000 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] evolution of the cli In-Reply-To: (A. P. Garcia via TUHS's message of "Sat, 1 Nov 2025 10:59:21 -0400") References: Message-ID: <7wecqgu3yb.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> A. P. Garcia wrote: > The Evolution of the Command Line: From Terseness to Expression I wonder if you are also interested in some evolutionary dead ends? I'm thinking about the ITS DDT/HACTRN command line interface. It's even barely a command *line* because most commands are one or a few key strokes. It certainly fits your "from terseness" thesis. If you have used this type of user interface for a while, you may notice the fluidity, immediateness, almost subconscious transfer from thought to keystroke to action. I'd say this is something that may have been lost. But not entirely, because it still lives on in the form of Emacs. I'm rerouting this subthread away from TUHS to COFF. I have seen some hand-wringing arguments that "Emacs does too conform to Unix philosophy because ". I say no. Emacs does empathically not conform to Unix philosophy, and it doesn't have to. It very much conformss to the ITS philosophy of user interfaces. Digging deeper through the historical strata, we can find a whiff of the Stanford AI lab in the Emacs user interface. Namely the heavy use of modifiers: control, meta, and if you have them, super, hyper, greek. ITS natively used only control and added the Altmode - Escape - prefix for more commands. MIT imported the Stanford AI lab keyboard with more modifiers and made use of them in Emacs. The modifiers proliferated even more with the Lisp machines which expanded on the ITS user interface.