Hacker News Reader

You believe that text as a universal interface isn't a good design principle because it doesn't reflect how other UIs, built upon completely different principles, behave? Is it not possible that it remains a good principle that WIMP GUIs simply do not adhere to? (Also related, "everything is a file.")

View on HN

Unformatted text (as in text that doesn't follow a machine-understandable format like xml or json) is not a good interface today, I absolutely believe that. Imagine if "ls" would return an xml table that you could easily reuse in other programs, including graphical editors. Imagine that the OS could understand what every column represents and give it a name. You could do something like

ls | showtable in.modified in.filename --sort:1.

Of course you can do this today with sed, but in a very unintuitive way not easily accessible for beginners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com