The Wizard and His Shell

I don't know, nothing struck me as new, the only difference is the presentation and the mouse (but I prefer keyboard). the example given for animated indicators already exists using ASCII escape codes. my zsh already has syntax highlighting on the prompt indicating mistyped commands, and suggest possible completions with a tui (with vim bindings). I could go on but anyway my point is everything they show is already possible with a tui, the only reason a clicky clicky solution doesn't exist is because keyboard are freakin better and faster. They are right that we need a terminal evolution/revolution, but it's not the mouse.
- GUIs do have advantages in things like discoverability. Honestly the 1983s Apple Lisa nailed this with the idea of having clickable menus annotated with keyboard shortcuts, so users could do the same thing faster next time. For some reason we stopped doing this (especially in web apps), but that's a reason to make better GUIs, not to RETVRN to the feature set of a VT100.
  I don't know why we have to go on nonsensical diatribes about "UNIX wizards" though when we're fundamentally talking about a handful of minor UI improvements to things that already exist.
  
  To me it reads like an AI generated article written to grab attention, and I spend a lot of time reading AI generated articles. Either the author has absolutely nailed the "sound like an AI" vibe, or very little effort was spent by an actual human to deliver this information.

This is really weird. I love working in the terminal precisely because I can do everything without using the mouse. I thought that's the point?
No hate though, I just don't get it.
- Fully keyboard accessible GUI goes TAB TAB TAB ENTER.
  
  That's better than nothing, obviously, but I wouldn't call pressing tab repeatedly the epitome of good keyboard-driven UX.
- I think users are increasingly mouse-centric so the ability to is the mouse I think is a plus, as long as it's all still just as accessible to a keyboard-centric workflow.
  But I think making the shell more interactive and adding more affordances is broadly a good thing and is really the important part, regardless of whether the user can navigate more with the mouse. The shell doesn't need to be a magic black box you speak the arcane language into and hope you got it right
  Anything that helps better communicate to the user what you can do and how to do it would make the terminal way more accessible, which would be a boon for linux where you still sometimes come across things that don't have a good graphical path to completion, or even just one that's easy enough to find and follow.
  Fish makes a lot of improvements (and it's a lot more Unix compliant than it used to be, to my understanding, but that's still its biggest downside) but I think more affordances and interactivity for the shell is awesome, even for users who appreciate the efficiency of a keyboard-centric workflow :)
- No the point of terminals is not to make people that dislike mice happy. They simply were created before mice were common and haven't been updated at all. This is an attempt to do that.
  
  Haven't been updated at all??? That's very much not true. There's so much going on in terminal world. There are many flavours of modern terminal emulators, multiplexers, shells. There's a ton of sophisticated terminal oriented software like Neovim for example. Pretty much every single part of terminal environment has now feature-rich, performant and safer alternative implementations. The terminal and CLI world is thriving. Almost none of that massive cumulative effort is directed towards the mouse support. I really think it's just not what people want.

What does this even mean, “a world without shells”? What is running inside this newfangled terminal if not a shell?

but like... none of this makes the terminal more powerful.
something like the Arcan lash/cat9 shell is a massive leap forward in terminal technology that may potentially completely change how we use it. it does this by understanding what makes the terminal productive: pipelining, batch processing and scripting.
meanwhile this is just... a skin.
- I don't think this is intended to fundamentally change what a terminal/shell does - it doesn't even go as far as Nushell. It's just about modernising the interface.
  
  it sure sounds like it's trying to. although i agree it's probably intentionally hyperbolic.
- None of the features discussed are aesthetic only.

Seems like a really neat project! As more of a ui/ux person than a technical one I use the terminal plenty, but find it more intimidating than I think most linux folks do
I love seeing anything that makes it more user friendly and interactive!

I love Nushell in Windows Terminal with Starship as an evolution and a leap of shell. Structured data, native format transformations, strong querying capabilities, expressive state information.
I was surprised that the linked article went an entirely different direction. It seems mainly driven by mouse interactions, but I think it has interesting suggestions or ideas even if you disregard mouse control or make it optional.

This is brilliant. A few things works best with mouse and a few with keyboard, but this isn't about keyboard vs mouse use. This is a redesign of the human-terminal interfacing, and is similar to Bret Victors thinking out of the box, re-design of different tools. It is rare to see attempts at redesigning the interfacing with old/well-known systems like the terminal or the global short-cut system (what a mess), etc. A normal terminal is completely archaic as a modern interactive command interface.
Only thing that sucks: More and more of my terminal tasks will from now on be handled by AI, so I might not have any use for it anymore.

Pretty sure that's an AI-generated image at the start of that article. That's when I stopped reading it.
- Nope. It links to an explanation of what that poster is:
  This is the UNIX Magic Poster, originally created by Gary Overacre in the mid-1980s and published by UniTech Software.
  
  Ah cool, thanks :)