[COFF] [TUHS] evolution of the cli

[Lars Brinkhoff via COFF]

A. P. Garcia wrote:
> The Evolution of the Command Line: From Terseness to Expression

I wonder if you are also interested in some evolutionary dead ends?  I'm
thinking about the ITS DDT/HACTRN command line interface.  It's even
barely a command *line* because most commands are one or a few key
strokes.  It certainly fits your "from terseness" thesis.

If you have used this type of user interface for a while, you may notice
the fluidity, immediateness, almost subconscious transfer from thought
to keystroke to action.  I'd say this is something that may have been
lost.  But not entirely, because it still lives on in the form of Emacs.

I'm rerouting this subthread away from TUHS to COFF.  I have seen some
hand-wringing arguments that "Emacs does too conform to Unix philosophy
because <after the fact rationalization>".  I say no.  Emacs does
empathically not conform to Unix philosophy, and it doesn't have to.  It
very much conformss to the ITS philosophy of user interfaces.

Digging deeper through the historical strata, we can find a whiff of the
Stanford AI lab in the Emacs user interface.  Namely the heavy use of
modifiers: control, meta, and if you have them, super, hyper, greek.
ITS natively used only control and added the Altmode - Escape - prefix
for more commands.  MIT imported the Stanford AI lab keyboard with more
modifiers and made use of them in Emacs.  The modifiers proliferated
even more with the Lisp machines which expanded on the ITS user interface.