I'll answer with a Koan, it's author long forgotten (if you know him, do tell me his name!):
A UNIX wizard hears cries of torment from his apprentice's computer room where the apprentice is studying, and goes to investigate.
He finds the apprentice in obvious distress, nearly on the verge of tears. "What's the problem?" he asks. "Why did you cry out?"
"It's terrible using this system. I must use four editors each day to get my studies done, because not one of them does everything."
The wizard nods sagely, and asks, "And what would you propose that will solve this obvious dilemma?"
The student thinks carefully for several minutes, and his face then lights up in delight. Excitedly, he says, "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything that the existing four editors do, but do their jobs better, and faster. And because of my new editor, the world will be a better place."
The wizard quickly raises his hand and smacks the apprentice on the side of his head. The wizard is old and frail, and the apprentice isn't physically hurt, but is shocked by what has happened. He turns his head to face the wizard. "What have I done wrong?" he asks.
"Fool!" says the wizard. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"
I'm not feeling immediately enlightened. The existence of a program doesn't inconvenience anyone. No-one has to use it if they don't want to. That wizard needs to chill out and not get so upset about people kicking ideas around.
No one has to use it, but someone has to decide not to use it. A major concern with newcomers to many, many systems in a wide variety of markets is what option to pick. Most go with the default, which reinforces that default but doesn't necessarily fit their needs. They do this because the choice is overwhelming.
I trust users who know how to use the shell to be able to decide what suits them best and to not be paralyzed by indecision between their system's default terminal emulator and some guy's obscure hobby terminal system.
I was specifically calling out the text editor comment of your parent, but there are many different choices for shells.
Bourne, ash, bash, dash, ksh, mksh, zsh, csh, tcsh, rc, GNU Screen, etc, Each of them has a slightly different featureset. You can go with the default of bash and it could work out very well for you, but you'd be turning down potentially better alternatives. You seem pretty derisive towards hobbyist projects for a site called "Hacker News". That hobbyist project could be the best thing you've ever used, but you'll never know. That was the entire point of my original post.
I did not imply that the default thing is necessarily better than hobby thing, but that someone who knows enough to know what a shell is knows what they want and how to get it. And if they made a poor choice, so what? It's easy to change one's mind.
Scrutinizing an idea for a new method of programmer-computer interaction from the perspective of a newcomer makes little sense to me, as does the "competing standards" thing from a neighboring comment, scrutinizing OP's idea for being potentially unable to win a popularity contest. OP's terminal system isn't a standard struggling to gain widespread public acceptance. It's just some guy's program.
I think that an idea about programmer-computer interaction ought to be scrutinized for its merit in facilitating programmer-computer interaction, and that criticism from a perspective that isn't the programmer's and isn't the computer's is useless.
PS. You forgot one of the most interesting Unix shells, es. It could turn out to be the best shell you've ever used.
The joke is that those four text editors mentioned by the student are also the result of someone one day attempting the impossible goal of creating the perfect tool.
Standards compete on many levels on a give-and-take basis and have very strong incentives to have a minimal amount of complexity. Text editors don't suffer from that set of requirements. This hypothetical editor does everything the others do, cleanly. Almost everyone will agree that it's better. To my eyes the only real problem is that creating the program itself is infeasible.
I disagree. There are already many text editors that do everything each other do, but they all do it differently, some in GUI some in command line, some with different shortcuts, etc. You could argue that Eclipse does almost everything and has a very high level of extensibility and yet you won't get me or many people I know to use it for most tasks.
It's not just about some checklist of possible actions it can do. It's about workflow, ease of use, integration with the larger jobs.
It's more similar to the "standards" argument than you give it credit for.
Other wise everyone would use emacs or eclipse.
Hypothetical is the key here. Everyone can dream up a perfect system, but in the real world, it will have to make compromises, which means that it won't be perfect for everyone.
The "UNIX way" isn't to write a better editor, it's to use an editor that interacts well with other tools (i.e., the tools we already have at the command line.)
The stance it's pushing is "understand the reasons why the tools before you are limited, and give some thought into the deeper reasons why you would want to create a new tool. Don't just rush headlong into it"
Yeah, how dumb and harmful that is, asking people to think before acting.
That would be the stance it pushed if it actually had anything revelatory to say about that idea, or if it wasn't trotted out mindlessly every time someone started work on a new tool. As it is, it's just hidebound smugness.
A UNIX wizard hears cries of torment from his apprentice's computer room where the apprentice is studying, and goes to investigate.
He finds the apprentice in obvious distress, nearly on the verge of tears. "What's the problem?" he asks. "Why did you cry out?"
"It's terrible using this system. I must use four editors each day to get my studies done, because not one of them does everything."
The wizard nods sagely, and asks, "And what would you propose that will solve this obvious dilemma?"
The student thinks carefully for several minutes, and his face then lights up in delight. Excitedly, he says, "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything that the existing four editors do, but do their jobs better, and faster. And because of my new editor, the world will be a better place."
The wizard quickly raises his hand and smacks the apprentice on the side of his head. The wizard is old and frail, and the apprentice isn't physically hurt, but is shocked by what has happened. He turns his head to face the wizard. "What have I done wrong?" he asks.
"Fool!" says the wizard. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"
Immediately, the apprentice is enlightened.