Arcan Project Announces The Modern & Radically Different Cat9 Shell

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Arcan Project Announces The Modern & Radically Different Cat9 Shell

The Arcan project that started out as a display server built atop a game engine and with time has introduced many features and experimenting with original approaches to longstanding Linux desktop/display shortcomings, has announced their Cat9 shell. This modern terminal has been in development for nearly six years while now the developers are finally confident in announcing this initiative...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arcan-Cat9-Shell

[reba]

To me this looks more like a text and keyboard based desktop environment than a shell.

Depending on a running display server means not being able to use this from TTY?

What use case is exactly solved by this?

[gnarlin]

Will this enable me to:
1. navigate folders and work with files interactively by clicking on them in the terminal window? (double click on a folder name to cd into it for example or double click a video file to play it or picture to view it or text file and it automagically opens in vim etc?)?
2. Can I drag 'n drop files to move or copy with the mouse?

[c117152]

To me this looks more like a text and keyboard based desktop environment than a shell.

Vim developers would tell you shells ARE text and keyboard based desktop environment,

Will this enable me to:
1. navigate folders and work with files interactively by clicking on them in the terminal window? (double click on a folder name to cd into it for example or double click a video file to play it or picture to view it or text file and it automagically opens in vim etc?)?
2. Can I drag 'n drop files to move or copy with the mouse?

Definitely doable if not already done.

[uid313]

I would like commands that return errors to be left out of the history too.

[Jaxad0127]

I would like commands that return errors to be left out of the history too.

Maybe leave them out of long term history, but for short term, it's very nice to be able to go back and fix an error instead of needing to retype it completely.

[c117152]

I would like commands that return errors to be left out of the history too.

The blog says "Stdout and Stderr are tracked separately" as well as "Contents can be forgotten, or selectively processed." so I think it's safe to say you can do that.

[acobar]

I would like commands that return errors to be left out of the history too.

So, if you mistype a nontrivial command, it must be deleted instead of edited?

No, thank you, I prefer to have the option to edit it and delete from history what I think is unneeded.

"history" and "history -d linenumber" are your friends.

[Vorpal]

All of this seems cool, but I question how useful it is in practice. And how would it work over ssh to a remote server if it is tied directly to the GUI?

Will this enable me to:
1. navigate folders and work with files interactively by clicking on them in the terminal window? (double click on a folder name to cd into it for example or double click a video file to play it or picture to view it or text file and it automagically opens in vim etc?)?
2. Can I drag 'n drop files to move or copy with the mouse?

1 can be done already with the right options (gnu coreutils ls has --hyperlink) and terminal (kitty for example supports those links) and configuration of what action to perform when you click those links.

2: many terminals support dragging files into the shell to paste the path. But I imagine that is more limited than what you mean.

I would like commands that return errors to be left out of the history too.

I'm fairly sure that can be done already in zsh with some hooks. Maybe not treating long and short term history separately though.

[skeevy420]

While I can see some appeals to it, I didn't really care for their defaults (or at least the defaults in the videos). For the short-term, I like all the noisy prompt stuff they try to hide and I don't really have an issue with wrong commands because I use Oh-My-Zsh, command-not-found, and autosuggestions from zsh-users. Usually when I type something wrong I get corrected or pushed towards what I need to install. When commands error it's usually something wrong with the program I'm running or I messed up some mundane detail in a script I'm writing. Long-term, it isn't that difficult to prune my command history to remove errors and duplicates.