Feature-request: bring back clickable ls results!
Bonus points for defining a new term type and standard for this.
$ man ls | grep '\--hyperlink' -A 1
--hyperlink[=WHEN]
hyperlink file names WHENYou see, Genera knows the actual type of everything that is clickable. When a program needs an input, objects of the wrong type _lose their interactivity_ for the duration. So if you list the files in some directory, the names of those files are indeed links that you can click on. Clicking on one would bring up a context menu of relevant actions (view, edit, print, delete, etc). If a program asks for a filename as input then clicking on a file instead supplies the file object to the program. Clicking on objects of other types does nothing.
I have this side-project fantasy of a very simple terminal pipe-types project. The basic idea is a set of very basic standardized types, demarcated using escape sequences. Dates, filenames, URLs, numbers, possibly one or two number units as well (time periods, file sizes only).
Tools that already produce columnar data (ls) get a flag that lets them output this format, and tools that work with piped data (cut, sort, uniq) get equivalents or modes that let them easily work with this.
Essentially, simple typed tables held in text, with enhancements for existing tooling to know how to deal with it. Would make my day-to-day on the command line much easier.
But note that on the Lisp Machine/Genera, every type has a presentation and can be “printed” to the REPL. This includes any new classes that you create as part of your own programs. It’s not just a small list of standard types, but every type.
The standard tutorial for the system is to implement Conway’s Game of Life. It has you create a class to hold the game board and then guides you through the process of defining a presentation for it so that the it can be displayed easily.
...glom on to this: "+JSONSchema" with some sort of UNIX-ish taxonomy. Everything from `man test`, add in `man du`, `date`, `... ago` (relative time) as you'd mentioned.
`jc ls | add_schema...` => `jq ...`
...or `jc ls --with-schema | jq ...`
(it appears as though `jc` already supports schema's, so perhaps it'd be `jc ls --with-types` or something, but there's your starting point!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40100069
"prefer shallow arrays of 'records', possibly with a deeply nested 'uri'-style identifier"
...the clutch result is: "it can be loaded into a database and treated as a table".
The origin of this technique for me was someone saying back in 2000'ish timeframe (and effectively modernized here):
sqlite-utils insert example.db ls_part <( jc ls -lart )
sqlite3 example.db --json \
"SELECT COUNT(*) AS c, flags FROM ls_lart GROUP BY flags"
[
{
"c": 9,
"flags": "-rw-r--r--"
},
{
"c": 2,
"flags": "drwxr-xr-x"
}
]
This particular example is "dumb" (but ayyyy, I didn't get a UUOC cat award!) in that you can easily muddle through it in different (existing pipeline) ways, but SQL crushes the primitive POSIX relationship tooling (so old, ugly, and unused they're tough to find!), eg: `comm`, `paste`, `uniq`, `awk`
See also:
* NuShell (https://www.nushell.sh/)
You should be able to get this to work on Unix with plan9port.
> Feature-request: bring back clickable ls results!