Pipes

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

Please forgive me if I'm talking crap, I know I have a tendency to shoot my
mouth off about issues I don't really understand. However, sometimes it's
the best way of finding out about those issues...

I've been thinking about the fact that existing GUIs like X and Windows are 
essentially "tacked on" to a command-line interface, and it is impossible to 
use the advanced features of the operating system through the GUI. (By 
"advanced features" I mean things like shell scripts or pipes. Not being an 
advanced user I can't name any others. :O) ) Whenever you want to do these 
things under Gnome, you pop up an xterm. Under Windows, you use a DOS box.

My question is, how many of these features could be represented in the GUI?
Take the example of pipes: would it be possible to create a "pipe applet"
which would allow the user to select two programs and launch them with a
pipe running between them? Could we set up some kind of "type checking" for
pipes running between Gnome applications (obviously it might not be possible
for older applications) so that only data of an appropriate type was
transfered (eg a list of files could be transferred from a file finding
utility to an archiving utility, but a jpeg image could not)?

Any thoughts? Is the shell indispensible?


Michael Rogers