Thought Experiment: JavaScript POSIX Shell

Okay, this one is a bit of an odd idea. My thinking is that you build a shell that will work in a browser window. The 'filesystem' is created in the browser's localStorage. Only the basic IO system and OS facilities are hardwired, the rest is implemented through executable 'files' in the filesystem.

The general idea is to make a lightweight shell that is programmable and could do some really cool stuff.

echo "Hey, I'm in a browser terminal!" | twitter

I've already hacked together a demo just to see how all the parts would work. Here are my findings.

User Interface

A text area is editable or not, whereas a terminal window is only editable at the cursor point. I puzzled over this one for a bit, wondering how to mimic this behavior in a browser, and then I dropped it and just did what was convenient: one editable textarea for commands, one for output. This is what that looks like:

At first I thought this was kind of a lame hack, but as I use it a bit more it feels quite intuitive. It's like posting on Twitter; you type on top and the command gets pushed onto the stack. But, you might ask, what about programs that take over the full terminal window? Well, in this case you just pass the lower window to the program and keep the upper for commands to the program. In the Vim editor, and most others, you always have a status/command line used for issuing commands anyway, so why not keep it on top?

Calling Convention

This is the one place that I wanted to stay very UNIXy. The commands are called with arguments and have access to stdin, out and err and everything is a 'file', meaning everything is a key/value pair in localStorage.

Files

In my first draft, the files are just key/value pairs with the file name being the key and the text being the value. There are a few problems with this.

First, file permissions/types are not implemented, which is mostly a problem because there needs to be a mechanism to determine what are executable files. Remember: everything is a file; all the commands 'echo, emacs (!)' will be JavaScript strings stored in the browser. Any user can make their own executables.

Second, a file heirarchy would be nice. Timestamps would be nice.

I think the best solution is to format the 'name' string with all the metadata, which would get stripped when accessed by the Terminal. So a file like /bin/echo would become < name='echo' path='/bin/echo' mode='-r-x' > if we want to use XMLish formatting.

Summary

I really like this idea. When I first got it up and running I was a bit giddy. It is browser based, but I also want to make it very Internet based. I would like to make it possible to wire in any site that has a public API; Social Networking, Mail, RSS, the works.