We've seen earlier posts of this. It's a shell that works on the premise that data is tabular. It's pretty neat. I'm not sure I can ever leave the traditional Unix shells behind though. I'm much more interested in a shell integrated with jq or something like that, but the reality is that Unix commands' input and output data types are not very well described or strongly typed, and that makes anything much better than the shell's we've got difficult to deal with.

I wonder if we could have a standard by which a command could indicate what input and output data types it consumes/produces for a given command-line, as well as what sorts of side-effects a command-line might have... Then we could have shells implement some type system. Where you expect XML you can use XPath, where you expect JSON you can use jq, and so on, and the shell could display tabulated output where possible, and not where not.