Kodsnack 227 - Xiki: an idea whose time has come

Fredrik chats with Craig Muth, creator of the more than slightly mind-bending Xiki about the past, present and future of this weird and wonderful evolution of the command line. Seeing Xiki in action is probably the best way to begin to grasp it, and Craig has created several great videos and screencasts.

We go all the way from Xiki’s beginnings as a framework inside of Emacs to its current state as a standalone companion to your normal command line, and its just launched Kickstarter to take the next step and become social by making it super simple to share and find commands. We also look further into the future, entering completely free-form speculation about where things could go both for command lines and user-extendable interfaces. (Yes, Hyper card and Opendoc both come up.)

Don’t assume things you want will happen - back things you want to succeed!

Cheer up the autumn: on October 3rd Suse is sponsoring a live pod and after work in Stockholm!

We’ll occupy Hobo at Brunkebergstorg 4. Doors open at 17, the pod commences somewhere around 18, and then we talk code, life, the universe, and everything and have some nice drinks for as long as we like.

We hope to see you there, and that you bring along a friend or two! The number of seats are limited, so send an email as soon as possible to [email protected] with your name, company and if you’re bringing anyone along.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

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Craig on Github
Xiki
The 2014 Xiki Kickstarter
The current (2017) Kickstarter - includes the videos we talk about
The older screencasts
Quicksilver
Xikihub
Riverdance
The talks are also on the screencasts page
Emacs
Elisp - Emacs Lisp
Bash
Z shell
The Medium post - Xiki: one developer’s quest to turbocharge the command line interface
Made to stick
React native
EJB
CORBA
JSON
CSON
YAML
AWS - Amazon web services
Xpath
Fish shell
Oh my zsh
Hyper
D3
Ward Cunningham
Smallest federated wiki
The Xiki tutorial
Roads and bridges: the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure - the paper Fredrik read
Hypercard
Mac LC computers
Opendoc
Steve Jobs explaining why he’s shutting down Opendoc

Titles

The command line is awesome when you know exactly what to type
All right, now I get it
Lost, but in a really exciting way
Make the command line work like a search engine
A missing piece in the command line
Making all the search results myself
It doesn’t take that many people
Riverdance with the horse and the banana
Now I get the one thing, but I don’t care
An idea whose time has come
Hey, that’s like a command line
Way back in Ohio
The power you get when you do remember the commands
The germ of Xiki
I’ve never been able to stop working on it
Users are so key
I could add something here!
Hey, this doesn’t exist yet!
In Ohio working at boring banks
This better work!
My friend Keith thinks I should move to San Francisco
Feeling comfortable in my skin for the first time
Escape gets you into more trouble!
People will fill in the gaps
Do for commands what Github did for code
Utterly freeform
This neat open thing