What's so great about Python?

It’s the language Hotwire is written in!

Unless you are me, or Colin Walters, you probably don’t know that I got a very insightful comment on my blog post at the end of last month, which explained how the Hotwire shell is coming along. Despite being in Debian testing, it is still alpha software, which the website admits, and this is one reason I shouldn’t have been too hard on it. Also, as the comment points out, there is a more recent version of the software than the one I tested and having downloaded that I can see it has improved noticeably. Trying it again I am happy to say that it is no slower or uglier than is appropriate for alpha software, and already has some killer features, such as the Undo support for deleted files. Moreover, the project seems to be headed in the right direction and developing fast which is a credit as much to the language as the developers themselves.

It is not yet ready to be used as a primary console, however, and I thought I’d list a few reasons I bumped into quite quickly even though the developers have probably already fixed them by the time I publish this. Firstly (and least significantly), there are the “1 commands” and “1 matches” grammatical errors. These are small problems but in theory easy fixes for easy points. Next, when you try running a command that doesn’t make sense like cat /etc/ you get nasty messages like

“Exception, 0 bytes Exception : [Errno 21] Is a directory”.

which is probably a feature for debugging purposes. Hopefully when it gets out of alpha or beta there will be some nicer messages for end users who don’t speak Python. Personally, more annoying was the fact that I couldn’t select the text of the error message, but that could be a limitation of the third party libraries used.

Then there are some usability concerns, which are understandably not the focus for alpha software. I’m not convinced about the metaphor used of up and down arrows to represent going effectively backwards and forwards in a history, especially as these buttons can disappear, change shape and don’t indicate whether the command they refer to is re-executed (it isn’t). Trusting the developers, I can only assume that the history interface is transitional in the way that it is navigated by pressing the Down arrow to go up and the Up arrow to go down the list of previous commands. Finally, it seems a bit of a shame and unexpected that clicking on one of the column headings in a directory listing doesn’t change the sort order, since the headings do look like buttons and this is conventional behaviour.

Finally, there is some behaviour which is probably due to bugs or missing features. Running /bin/echo -e "foo\nbar" produces foonbar, ignoring the backslash rather than interpreting it or just outputting it. Also, it seems the tab completion process is easily confused, such that pressing Tab adds spaces after the cursor and pressing Shift doesn’t select the currently selected option as expected. During tab completion, the Up and Down arrow keys don’t have an effect, which is a shame, and if you try to tab complete on “kw” you get “sh /usr/bin/kwebdesktop” and then have to press Tab nine times to get to “kwrite” (as it is then too late to think about adding the “r”).

Anyway, I wish the developers every success and expect I will soon start recommending this software to all the new people starting to use or switching to Linux. What sort of text-based interfaces will people who have grown up with Linux make?