A Spreadsheet and a Debugger Walk into a Shell

224 pointsposted 10 months ago
by JNRowe
(arcan-fe.com)

21 Comments

myponybaloney

10 months ago

So cool! I'd never thought about a spreadsheet interface for the shell, but it makes total sense. The other demos (a little more than halfway down the page) are amazing too:

https://arcan-fe.com/2022/04/02/the-day-of-a-new-command-lin...

simonjgreen

10 months ago

Oof this comment makes me feel old. My first encounters with spreadsheets were in text mode dos.

wordpad25

10 months ago

Total Commander keeps DOS UI alive and is a popular alternative to explorer.

actionfromafar

10 months ago

Supports Windows® 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11, and Windows® 3.1.

That's some dedication.

hnlmorg

10 months ago

There’s some seriously impressive work that’s gone into that shell

pkphilip

10 months ago

Brings back memories of Lotus 123

sigmonsays

10 months ago

this looks really great

I need to follow this more closely. I tried installing cat9 (from them as well) and it didn't work out on nixos. Might take another stab at it

guestbest

10 months ago

This reminds me of using smalltalk where everything is an object and output can be piped in to any structure that can be programmed

shoggouth

10 months ago

Could you elaborate?

guestbest

10 months ago

A spreadsheet it just a view broken up in to rectangle cells and that compares favorably to the JavaScript smalltalk variants I’ve seen online such as this one https://amber-lang.net/

The output when it’s not an error message can redirected in to another function and so on and so forth until it’s not entirely programming and not entirely a prebuilt interface. A smalltalk VM is like an operating system as a repl as long as you’re skilled enough to not keep hitting error messages.

jmward01

10 months ago

A machine learning program walks into a bar. (loss .999) A machine learning program walks into a bar. (loss .625) A machine learning program ducks a bar. (loss .482)

systems

10 months ago

i am surprised emacs doesn't have this already emacs seems more like the right place for this

that being said, i think the spreadsheet being a separate command line tool make more sense, i dont understand why integrate it into the shell

nushell or pwsh, might make use of a spreadsheet view, since they pass or stream objects not text , but still the spreadsheet should be a separate program

xk3

10 months ago

nushell has `open file.xlsx | explore --peek` which can be used to interactively select a cell contents from an Excel spreadsheet and pipe it into another command. It would be cool if there were similar tools for editing table data.

See also the `inspect` command... I feel like they could add a lot of neat Smalltalk-like interactivity (Bret Victor-level observability)

systems

10 months ago

in pwsh you can

    Out-GridView
which gives you a full graphical view, you cannot edit data, and its usually the last step in a pipeline

between nushell and pwsh, i think pwsh is the way to go, only drawback it required dotnet installed, nushell being more standalone beat it on this

rrrix1

10 months ago

I have always felt pwsh is one of those "great idea, poorly implemented" things.

I mean, who puts Verbs-InCommandNames? No one who wants to actually remember all of their CLI tools. That's who.

systems

10 months ago

well, its a convention , it makes it easier to guess the command name, and considering in pwsh you have hundreds of commands, finding the command can be a challenge

pwsh have autocomplete and command to help you find other commands

pwsh is actually more unixy than unix, it have more specialized commands in linux you have bigger command, commands that do at lot, and take a lot to learn

pwsh is a great idea, implemented very nicely, i dont see any major flaws , except poor adoption on linux .. and of course dotnet dependency

a native pwsh would be amazing

rrrix1

10 months ago

But... Then you have to actually use emacs.

  /shiver

sim7c00

10 months ago

re-inventing the shell, not the wheel. love it!