alt Hacker NewsI don't want "a terminal", I want a command based interface combined with being able to use the same set of tools/commands on all the files I interact with.
Like, it gets taken for granted, but being able to literally grep my html file, my program source and my readme file, instead of having to open a separate gui program and using its bespoke seach menu feature, is really, really nice.
There are downsides of course, like the way we keep jamming everything into the square hole that is 1980s terminal emulators and character based displays, but frequently this is worth it.
Thankfully Xerox PARC has an answer for that across Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, XDE, and Cedar, and copied to certain extent in modern programming languages, REPL environments and notebooks.
Augmented nowadays with agent environments and tools in IDEs, which can even be voice controlled.