Webterm future

[matthewauld]

I know that (for entirely good reasons) webterm isn't at the top of the priority lists development-wise, but I was wondering what/if the future plans are for it? It seems like it could become a powerful tool that could real advantages over a traditional command line like the ability to return javascript objects, numbers and strings from commands, and can provide rich output. It kind of grabbed my imagination.

I was wondering what people thought about some of the following ideas, or there were better ways to do these things?

• composing commands with then and catch (e.g. readFile xxx json then filter x.id==1 then echo catch echo "not a file"). commands that wanted to allow composing could take a input=null argument.
• exposing webterm command back-ends to one another through the this object- so when programming a custom command, being able to access the functions of other commands to compose them together. It would create some dependency issues, but nothing that could be worked out.
• scripts: one of the huge advantages of a command line is the ability to automate a process. I don't see an advantage to building a new scripting language (since javascript is already a good one that people know), but being able to run "javascript" that could run and have access to the this object of webterm might be a compromise.

[pfrazee]

Hey @matthewauld yeah it's awesome to hear you're digging Webterm.

I'm working right now (half a commit done) to sandbox webterm commands properly so we can feel less anxiety about running them. That seems like a pretty key first step, so it wont be in this week's release but probably the next one.

There's a semi-outdated webterm specs repo. Why don't we start doing proposals there? I think command composition would be a great thing to start discussing.

[matthewauld]

Oh, neat, I didn't realize it had all be laid out.

[pfrazee]

Yeah we're ready to go!

[matthewauld]

For anyone reading this - this is a way better way to do composition, as it can be non-linear.

[johanbove]

I love webterm. I use my "blogpost" command to write my microblog posts and it's to me at least, the fastest way to browse through drives.

[matthewauld]

That is a great idea. Honestly never thought of doing that!