Comment by bradchoate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradchoate | Hacker News Reader

"please", a command-line interface for natural language commands. So, like Siri, but for your terminal. Ie:

  $ please push the changes i've made today to the master repo
  $ please archive this directory into foo.zip
  $ please clone the bootstrap repo from github
  $ please find any files under ~/ matching 'foo-*.txt' and containing 'bar'

Sure, all of these can be expressed using CLI tools we have today, but isn't it time we had an interface layer that abstracts away all of the fiddly switches and just did what we said?

It would offer a pluggable interface for extending its capability and vocabulary.

I'd wager that ANY person who actually uses CLI tools to do things does not want, nor need, to write full sentences to do these things. Everyone that uses CLI tools always says they do so because it is the fastest way possible to do X. That point becomes moot once you have to write sentences.

I don't know - I live in the terminal, and I definitively wouldn't use it for regular commands (sed, grep, tar, etc), but if it was smart enough, I could see myself using it for software that I rarely use and which has complicated options.

For example, I'd rather type

  please convert movie.avi to h264 at 720p with subtitles from movie.srt

than having to read the man page of avconv each time.

Bonus points if it could print the translated command before running it - it'd double as a learning tool.

Or even if it'd only output the translate command line. Like a better apropos. A nice idea for sure.

That is an excellent idea! Make it cross platform, and able to install missing tools, combine it with speech to text and you would be able to talk to any device regardless of the software installed on the device.

    please open presentation X from my dropbox

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