caveat: I'm extrapolating from the descriptions and screenshots.
I think it's kinda neat, textual shells need to embrace the power of graphical representations (as in CLIM for Common Lisp). Nonetheless, I don't think that overloading something like "cat" with the ability of showing images is a good idea. Classic unix tools have a precise semantics, and if you start messing around, they may become inconsistent. (For example: does "cat pic.jpg | strings" extracts EXIF? "cat pic1.jpg pic2.jpg" concatenates two images in a single image? Horizontally or vertically?)
If you decide that you don't need the power given by homogenous textual representations, scripting and anonymous pipes, maybe something like the verb-noun metaphor of QuickSilver is more suited.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 13.3 ms ] threadI think it's kinda neat, textual shells need to embrace the power of graphical representations (as in CLIM for Common Lisp). Nonetheless, I don't think that overloading something like "cat" with the ability of showing images is a good idea. Classic unix tools have a precise semantics, and if you start messing around, they may become inconsistent. (For example: does "cat pic.jpg | strings" extracts EXIF? "cat pic1.jpg pic2.jpg" concatenates two images in a single image? Horizontally or vertically?)
If you decide that you don't need the power given by homogenous textual representations, scripting and anonymous pipes, maybe something like the verb-noun metaphor of QuickSilver is more suited.