Michael McCracken is interested in a shell with better auto completion functionality. I use zsh because it's had super auto completion functionality for a long time. At the hackathon, someone, Ben Laurie, I think was recommending the "new" bash-completion, because it would help with all those gpg commands. The zsh autocompletion for gpg can also complete people's user id's which goes beyond what bash-completion does (today, at least). I've been impressed, though, with how fast the bash project is improving. I'd love to see a similar thing for zsh.

In any case, neither of these will produce a code completion style of UI for the command line, which seems to be at the heart of what Michael is asking for. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, since zsh can already do incremental-search through its history, so it seems like it would be a matter of gluing the appropriate code together.

At the hackathon, Ben Hyde showed me McCLIM (I think) running under OpenMCL, which would be another source of good ideas for improving the command line experience.

Thinking about shell improvements inevitably led me to thinking about the new MSH that will be part of Longhorn. Jon Udell had a great introduction which demonstrated some of the nice features of the shell. I'm glad to see Microsoft taking a new approach to the command line. Most of what we have is many years old, and I can't believe that we've exhausted all the ways of making command line interfaces better.