Recommended reading

[Michael Rudolph]

On Wednesday 20 February 2008 23:17:34 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 February 2008, Jeremy wrote:

> the GUI command line stuff is one of those quiet undercurrents that's
> been going around for a few years now and is quite interesting.
> krunner is heavily inspired by these ideas; krunner is not
> particularly innovative (yet?). really i just needed something to
> replace the minicli from kdesktop and decided we may as well try to
> do something Better(tm) or even maybe Right(tm) .. i'm a big believer
> in this whole gui/cli concept, though, and where krunner goes beyond
> what is out there right now is in two important places:
>
> * the plugins are available for anyone to use, it's not a
> cut-off-from-the-rest-of-the-world tool. quicksilver, katapult,
> gnome-do, deskbar .. they are all fairly sealed off. i think this is
> simply a case of not realizing the full possible scope. runners
> should become pervasive (e.g. kickoff, a plasmoid, perhaps even in
> other apps?)
>

Hello everyone,

very insightful remarks. This also reminds me of the best user interface 
I have seen so far. The shell.

It uses some form of plugins, too. Every new tool integrates seamlessly 
into the whole and is hardly sealed off. Every tools functionality can 
be used in scripts or interactively in single commands or through pipes 
in monstrous command lines.

The most obvious problem that the shell has is that it acts on files on 
a filesystem and is mainly text based. Both are things in which users 
in their right mind would not at all be interested. If one could 
cleverly abstract away from the filesystem and perhaps use archives 
that contain all the files pertaining to one task (or document, like 
openoffice already does) instead of plain files, than one would really 
have a wonderful interface, through which users could harness the power 
of their computers.

By the way, I call it plash. The plasma shell. The shell that acts on 
what is important to the user (in contrast to current shells, that act 
upon what is easily digestible for a computer).

@Aaron: I hope this is in line with your wish to collect some ideas for 
plasma and not just some fanboy pipe dreams, that hinders development 
more than it helps.

michael