Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!samsung!aplcen!haven!udel!udccvax1!sun.acs.udel.edu!weave From: weave@sun.acs.udel.edu (Ken Weaverling) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: How to improve the Mac (was Re: Text file madness on the Mac.) Summary: Command line interface for the Mac Message-ID: <6476@sun.acs.udel.edu> Date: 8 Jan 90 02:06:44 GMT References: <2706@aecom.yu.edu> <5900@ncar.ucar.edu> <1998@eric.mpr.ca> <5915@ncar.ucar.edu> <8315@cbnewsm.ATT.COM> <6472@sun.acs.udel.edu> Reply-To: weave@sun.acs.udel.edu (Ken Weaverling) Distribution: na Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 46 In article pete@titan.rice.edu (Pete Keleher) writes: > >weave@sun.acs.udel.edu (Ken Weaverling) writes: >> OK, what does the Mac need? Let's have a useful discussion and maybe, just >> maybe, someone from Apple will say "Gee, neat idea" and implement it. >> >> 1) A command line window. Forget religous grounds against doing >> this. It'd be useful in A LOT OF cases. >Apple isn't unaware of this problem. Its precisely to make up for this sort of >deficiency that MPW and the VERY powerful script language of SADE were created. >Problem is, non-programmers as well as programmers who consider MPW a giant >kludge (I admit I haven't used the newest version) are still out in the cold. OK, MPW is around, but not easy to invoke. If I want to merge two files together, I should be able to pop up a command line window, type in a cat command of some sort, and have it go. This IMHO would not violate the Mac UI cause it would be OPTIONAL, but for those who want it, it would be there. Great idea for a small app. It could be written, code from GNU utilities put into it for pattern matching, grepy and awkish kind of stuff, etc... (Which would guarantee it being free due to FSF copyleft notices :-) I'd love to do something like that myself, but who knows what direction Apple is going in... Back in 1985 I started writing a "language" to run multiple apps in a row (for chaining startup apps). It started growing in this direction, but I abandonded it cause of rumours of some great system language Apple was about to release that would turn non-programmers into programmers, etc... Turns out that this was Hypercard, and not this amazing thing that the press and Apple first hyped. (OK, it's neat, but not what *I* expected...) Apple seems to be promising some sort of scripting language, so perhaps something like a message window in Hypercard is coming. Then again, it's been coming for years now... OS/2 and Windows have ways of getting to a command line. Amiga has a CLI window. All of the neat graphic shells for UNIX have a way to get to a command line. Why not the Mac? -- Ken Weaverling - Systems Administrator | Internet: 00499@vax1.acs.udel.edu Delaware Technical & Community College | Voice: +1 302 573 5460