CANNOT believe I hadn’t heard of Xiki. hard to describe. kind of like a text-base glamorous toolkit or REBL. kind of like a structural interface over the command line. tons of ideas (more info in thread)—

Love it! The website’s video has a clear statement about using natural language to search for what your intent is then simply select the code you desire. This is very neat! Thank you for sharing. “read a file” “send a text message” 🔥

a terrific improvement over the typical Unix shell. Am surprised that no OS maker has adopted this. So powerful.

Thanks for mentioning this. It's a very old project, and I had looked at it in its early stages but found it disappointing in many ways. Time to have another look.

yeah, it seems like development is continuing on github but the maker is struggling to monetize. and steve i had half a mind to tag you but i figured you’d see it haha

First impression is again disappointing. The installation instructions contain obvious mistakes, and then the tutorial refers to a non-existing Web page. The various videos are worth watching to get the idea, but the implementation is mostly a source of frustration. For those who tried it out: to uninstall, you need to delete

~/.xsh

and

~/.xiki

, both of which are created silently when you first run

xsh

. And you must remove the line appended to

.zshrc

(or its bash equivalent), which says

source ~/.xsh

.

Seeing this surface here has reminded me to mention my favorite "what if the shell was also an editor and the mouse was quite powerful" system, Acme.

love acme! yet another project that i wish there was more beginner-friendly documentation on

I contributed to the Xiki Kickstarter, even met up with Craig to try some pairing on it (though we didn’t get that far), and then watched the mailing list traffic as the project gradually lost support. (The most recent thread was two years ago, when his pitch for a second Kickstarter was shot down by the backers of the first one: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xiki/Dvzo14Lhoyg ) It’s still a lovely idea, buried by its creator sacrificing near-term assistance in pursuit of a long-term dream that will probably not be reached. It’s yet another lesson in the difference between an Open Source license and an actually open project. If he’d properly shared his work and made it easy to contribute, Xiki would probably be usable today.