Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Shells tightly bound to directory.

I'm usually the guy who wants more. More features, more flexibility.

My rule is "first implement all reasonable features in an orthogonal manner. Then choose the defaults."

E.g. "provide a command line switch for all ioptions. But then provide a reasonable default, wghich may corresponsd to a set of switches, or a reasonabe set of switches for various default combinations".

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However, more and more I am thinking that my present usage model might benefot from LESS flexibility in the Unix shell.

I live in emacs.  Many shell windows, each typically named for the directory they are in.

It's a pain when I chdir away from that directory inside such a window.  Occasionally I make errors.

I think that I might like to REMOVE the ability to chdir in such a shell.

(Can do this via aliases? Impefect.)