Is Hotwire the best piece of software yet?

Bugs? And feature requests

I have done a reasonably thorough trawl of the project’s bug reports and not found any of my complaints listed. I could swamp the bug tracker with multiple bugs all at once, but I thought I should try starting a conversation first, to see if I’m thinking along the right lines. If my conception of what Hotwire is supposed to be is completely at odds with that of the main developers, then my bug reports should be answered with a stock “You’ll have to fork the code.” response. Anyway, here, in no particular order, are my questions and concerns.

1. The drop down for recent directories contains dupes, as does the “Tab History” (unlike the MySQL client, for example)
2. Tab completing on cd on a directory with no subdirectories gave “(No matches)” twice, on separate lines
3. Why does HotSSH appear in a new window, not a new tab?
4. Why does the “Tools” menu not contain any tools, and make “Help” harder to find?
5. Sort by “Owner” or “Group” column doesn’t seem to work
6. The “X” for closing tabs seems to have lost a few columns of pixels from the right hand edge in the active tab
7. Colours could be used to distinguish between directories and commands (for example in tab names)
8. I SSHed to localhost, tried to open a text file, got “Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console” on one line (typo) then “Could not get a file descriptor referring to the console”
9. In an SSH session, open should attempt to load the file on the local machine by calling the appropriate program with an sftp:// or fish:// URL
10. In HotSSH there are no Alt+ shortcuts for opening the menus
11. In HotSSH, “Connect to host”, the drop-down is full of options that seem impossible to understand. It should look in .ssh/config for “Host” lines
12. What are the technical limitations preventing the Hotwire features being available in a HotSSH session? What if some of the code was refactored out to run on the remote end?

UI ideas

The rest of my comments concern an incomplete vision I have for Hotwire’s user interface, and the specific alterations that would have to be made to conform the current design to it. Most of these ideas are independent of each other and could be recycled into other designs if people had better ideas. The main principle underlying my changes is that the web browser / file manager UI conventions are well known, and if they were applied to Hotwire they would make its UI more easily learnable.

1. The recent directory drop-down should probably be on the same line as the command input box, for tradition and to help in writing relative paths
2. “Back” and “Forward” do not refer to directory navigation, and should be placed differently to the “Up” button
3. To completely mimic a browser like Firefox, there could be a bar at the top with “Back”, “Forward”, “Run command again”, then the directory drop down, then the command box
4. A “Go” button could be added at the end for people who are pasting with the mouse and want to execute the command with it too
5. Similarly a “Clear” button, for people who don’t like holding down Backspace (see Konqueror)
6. Ideas for “Up”:
   • If there is an “Up” button, it should probably go at the right hand end too
   • The directory drop-down could be a list of directories above and including the current one, so “Up” would be two clicks away
   • The idea from Issue 160 could be combined so that any higher directory can be accessed with one click
7. An alternative method for accessing the history would be to make the command input box a drop-down too
8. A history drop-down box could contain both working directory and command history, distinguished by colour
9. Having the drop-downs at the top would mean they could literally drop down in the conventional way, rather than up (which works badly for me in KDE)
10. Some mouse-over text should be added for the buttons and drop-downs to explain what they do and what they’re for
11. Make the directory drop-down change width based on the current value, not the largest value in the history, as it often contains mainly blank horizontal space
12. A combination of the changes above should make the confusing “n pipelines” button obsolete
13. The tab bar should appear below the command input box
14. The “Type:” expansion button (if that’s what it is) opens a sidebar and moves the type to the left in an unexpected way, making it hard to toggle. Find a better way of making the sidebar appear, such as Konqueror / Kate’s vertical tab system
15. Text like “hotwire.sysdep.fs_impl.fs_gnomevfs.GnomeVfsFile” takes up a lot of space unless truncated and its relation to other elements isn’t clear
16. Any remaining UI elements could be moved below the command output pane

Conclusion

It is a joy to see such an important project progress so quickly. I would love to see this software reach a version 1,0 that everyone can be proud of, and maybe then a community would form around it who could write introductory manuals and produce videos explaining how to use the command line, aimed at Unix novices. Imagine trying to explain to someone the logic of having progressively less of the tail end of the output from their previous command being visible just above where they are entering their current command. “Well… there used to be these things called teletype machines…”

Now, do any bug tracking systems allow bulk input of bugs? How would a project evolve if you hooked up some spamming software to the email interface of its bug tracker and the developers didn’t realise?