Hacker News Reader

Comment by phogster | Hacker News Reader

No.

Why?

Just throwing out a quick response (I'm not GP) but because they are different interfaces. While they both may display the same content and in the broader overall sense behave similarly, how you interact with the content and program itself is different.

Would you expect curl to exhibit the same url suggestion/correction behavior as firefox does?

These tools are only CLI/GUI equivalents of each other in a very superficial sense.

No, because the suggestion behavior is a direct function of the UI. I may expect my shell to offer suggestions or autocomplete based on previous history, however. With either program, I expect them to both perform the core task of "download stuff".

Dash and grep may have different interfaces, but if their core purpose is "search stuff", it is not wholly unreasonable to expect them to be able to search the same stuff.

[grep is probably the wrong tool. perhaps the output should be included in find instead.]

> if their core purpose is "search stuff"

As I said, they are the same tool only in the most superficial of senses. Is the purpose of this ubuntu thing even to grep input streams or files? Or did the submitter of this 'bug' actually mean to file a bug for slocate, mlocate, or find? Does it do both? These tools have completely different purposes and uses.

How about this for another reason though: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/gre... GNU is bad enough, having Ubuntu tack on whatever shit they feel is "user friendly" would turn the situation into a usability nightmare.

PS. Is this thing seriously called dash? If so, that is terrible. The name 'dash' is already taken... in the FOSS world... by Ubuntu's daddy distro Debian. Hell, Googling "ubuntu dash" returns first results for the proper dash. What the hell were they thinking?

Two things:

1. Why on earth wouldn't you want url suggestion/completion for cURL? If there's one place that benefits from a lack of typing it's command-line tools (which is why modern shells all have command and file tab completion).

2. Browsers like 'links' and 'w3m' go so far as to implement mouse support so you can emulate a GUI on the console. Why not for cURL? Just because it has a billion obscure command-line arguments doesn't mean it's a great idea to keep it that way. With a console ncurses UI for cURL I could pick all the options I wanted quickly instead of paging through dozens of man page options, then copying them down with the argument I wanted and re-typing them in line.

I don't think shells should suffer from a lack of innovation just because everyone's obsessed with JavaScript.

zsh

...is not a part of curl.

And that is rather the point is it not? If you want to add completion to curl, you don't. Because that is a task for another program. If you want to add amazon searching to grep, you don't. Because that is a task for another program.

My point was that command-line completions are possible, and are, in fact, pretty sophisticated. Despite my using 'zsh' as the meme, I'm much more a bash user myself, but even its commandline completions are extensive, and include the ability to suggest completions, alternatives, and the like. Commands such as ssh will utilize various resources to suggest hostname completions and the like.

Whether and how desirable this is is quite the different question. But it's very technically feasible.

I am not saying that it could not be done.

I am saying it should not be done, and cannot be done well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com