Xiki: An amazing shell
These alternative shells always get me really excited, until I try them out. Then the drawbacks become immediately and very painfully obvious:<p>- Some are extremely slow, especially those that rely on complete webservers / node.js / whatever as a backend<p>- Memory-hungry. I've got an average of about 30 terminals open at all times. 50 Mb per terminal really is a bit too much. 10 Mb is the upper limit on what a single terminal should ever use.<p>- Don't work remote. If it doesn't work remotely without installation (and none do), it's pointless to me.<p>- Don't integrate properly. For instance, copy-pasting is suddenly painfully impossible or unicode fails or it doesn't handle ncurses or escape sequences properly.<p>- Doesn't add anything that the history and copy-pasting don't already do nearly perfectly.<p>- Doesn't follow the "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible" philosophy. For example, catting large (10mb) log files or a binary file completely barfs it.<p>I wonder if Xiki is any different, as I haven't tried it yet. It seems unwieldy to use. Why would I want to physically move the cursor to a previous command 50 lines up when I can just do Ctrl-R <part of the command> and be done with it?<p>This all sounds a bit negative, which isn't my intention. It's just that I've become quite a skeptic when it comes to "(email|shell|editor|etc) reinvented" claims.