Note: This section is a work-in-progress.
It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.
-- Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
For me, the shell -- whether it be cmd or bash -- is an "everyday thing". You'd think that after all this time I'd be completely comfortable with using a shell, but I'm not. There's not a day that goes by that I don't forget what script does what, or confuse which flag combinations to use, or make a typo and screw something up.
The shell is not forgiving.
Of course, it's not entirely the shell's fault. It just does what we tell it to. But therein lies the problem: humans are altogether incredibly faulty creatures. Pair that with a dumb terminal and you have a recipe for disaster.
I want a shell that understands. I want a shell that asks me, "Why are you trying to rm -r /?" before I wreck my laptop. This is not an impossible goal; I can already whip out my phone and talk to an artificial assistant in a natural language about stock prices, the weather, and what meetings I have scheduled in the afternoon. Why these facilities are not also on my desktop is beyond me.
Evolve output beyond the monospace character grid; use rich media and design.
-- Steven Wittens, TermKit
It should come as no surprise that TermKit is one of the inspirations for jarvis. The idea that a shell should be able to display syntax-highlighted code or play videos is a compelling one.
However, upon looking at TermKit's code I was slightly disappointed. A lot of the formatting for this "rich media" was handled by hard-coded CSS. In reality, the data itself should dictate how it's displayed in a uniform and predictable way.
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A complete bash replacement
For all its shortcomings, bash has stood the test of time because it does what it does remarkably well. jarvis is not intended to be its replacement, but rather a supplement focusing on the above goals. As such, things like full-screen buffers (e.g. vi, emacs) and bash scripting will not be supported.
General Rule: Avoid dependencies if at all possible.
Status: Included
Used mostly for the crucial copySync() function, which emulates cp -r and allows us to copy the user folder out of the shell on first run. Also has a lot of other functions that may be useful.
Status: Undecided
GitHub says to write all new applications in CoffeeScript, and the language is really great. But we have to remember our general rule. So far, there has been no reason to drop pure JavaScript in favor of CoffeeScript.
Status: Undecided
As most of our JavaScript is backend-related and not with the DOM, jQuery is likely not that useful.
@TODO
jarvis consists of two distinct halves: an application-agnostic kernel that encapsulates core functionality, and a frontend client that communicates with the kernel and displays these interactions.
A client must be connected to a kernel to function; when a client is connected, this is called a "session". A kernel may be connected to multiple clients at the same time; this is a shared (or collaborative) session. It may be helpful to think of the kernel as a chatroom, with jarvis as the moderator and various clients as users currently in the room.
For convenience, each running kernel provides a hardline client as a "reference implementation", accessible at the server's root URL. Note that this client has limited features (no settings persistence, no theming, etc.), but is a reference because everything that it can do should also be supported by derivative client implementations.
@TODO
All communication is done in JSON.
@TODO
Clicking the jarvis icon to the left of the omnibar opens the Control Panel.
@TODO
- Asynchronous task completion (possibly handled by the Control Panel)
- Drag/drop of files and data to/from the shell
References have been moved to notes. Please see that document for an extensive list of related work, as well as general useful links.