Core inspirations

HotwireVsBinSh talks about what Hotwire takes from Unix `/bin/sh` (a lot)

HotwireVsPowerShell is dedicated to the Hotwire's influence from Windows PowerShell (mostly object piping).

Other projects

Gnome Command Interface - GCI has some similarites (Python, GNOME basis, backgrounding jobs). However, a big push GCI seems to be implementing strongly reliable completion, with a lot of work on grammar. In contrast Hotwire has a simpler completion scheme (basically just like Unix shell, assuming file names). Hotwire's syntax is ridiculously simple: pipeline.split(" | ") Other differences are Hotwire's interest in being crossplatform.

XMLTerm - Old, but highly innovative for the time.

Terminator - A terminal with a few added features like find and unlimited scrollback by default.

CUI - Looks based around having parsers for the output of various shell commands, and doing things like colorization, linkification of file names, etc. Related, but I think the approach (C, parsing shell commands instead of implementing them natively) is going to be too restrictive. Hotwire tries to implement a lot of useful functionality inside the core (fixing it along the way, e.g. rm), but still allowing callouts to /bin/sh.

SCSH - Scheme and ncurses based enhanced interactive shell, very interesting ideas in there - see the PDF.

Anthias A multi-terminal with integrated file browser; does not have object pipeline. Targets KDE, written in C++. They chose to do a frontend/backend separation from the start using a custom protocol. Development looks stalled.

RubyUnix - Rewrite a traditional Unix shell in Ruby (the goal looks more like IPython than Hotwire)

PyShell - Rewrite traditional Unix shell in Python.

Omnitty SSH - Multiplex commands over multiple hosts

gsh Very similar ideas to Hotwire. Fairly old. Written in TCL/TK. TODO: Download source and investigate this more.

Wicked Shell - Shell integration for Eclipse. Looks like they have some basic completion and crossplatform functionality. Might be worth investigating.

LinuXML Looks like they picked a Big Idea (XML), rather than trying to be practical.

vshnu Attempt at tty-based shell in Perl. Quite old now but may have some ideas.

Fish shell - Interested in fixing some of the same problems we are (e.g. features not on by default), although they are limited by their choice of being just a login shell instead of combination "terminal"+shell.

Viewglob - Does some functional (but ugly) filemanager/terminal integration

IPython - Looks like you can execute system commands, but more oriented towards being a tool for Python programming. Still though a pretty big project with some interesting ideas and probably code. Might want to look at their "distributed computing" stuff - maybe a better way to run pipelines? Update: IPipe looks interesting

osh - Pipes objects. May be interesting for syntax ideas?

EShell - Highly programmable with Emacs Lisp, targets Emacs UI. Also worth pulling ideas from.

Sun Shared Shell - is shared interesting for us?

Quasi - no GUI, seems to have syntax ideas

KHPython - Python worksheet program

Pash is a cross platform version of Microsoft Powershell that runs on the Mono runtime as well as standard .NET

Articles

CLI - Website devoted to the CLI.

Advogato entry - Someone wondering why the Unix shell isn't better.

Free Software Magazine has an article asking "If CLIs are so impenetrable, why don’t we use some GUI technology to make them less so?"