TopShell: Reimagined Terminal and Shell

I was never comfortable in Bash. Doing anything that didn't fit in one line filled me with doubt. Did this piece of Bash do what I thought it would do?

It almost never did. Forgivingly, Bash let me use undefined variables. Bash let me continue executing dangerous commands even after an error had put my script in a broken state. The simplest of calculations I often got wrong. Anything interesting required learning some arcane language like sed and awk. Not to mention literally hundreds of tiny, faulty parsers I've written over the years to deal with one-of-a-kind textual output from commands.

So I started to imagine what a terminal might look like, if freed from the constraints of the 1970'ies.

Not Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater

Programmatic, interactive access to the operating system is a great achievement of Unix, and something that I rely on completely in my daily interaction with computers.

I do a lot of remote server administration using the very same interface, via SSH. I wouldn't want to be stuck without that.

One Year Later