(I love how this topic has digressed from its origins.)

(29-11-2018, 12:13 PM)z3bra Wrote: There is no "standard" tool.

That's the problem: The pure existence of a theoretical standard which is only partially implemented will not make your life easier. In theory, a lot of users could rely on a consistent userland, e.g. "vi is everywhere", including certain versions of Windows. Now can they?

(29-11-2018, 12:13 PM)z3bra Wrote: I think POSIX is still relevant today. I think it defines a sane base for OS development

Function-wise, yes - command-wise, probably not. Much of POSIX was written without any respect to graphical user interfaces. (I'll come back to that.)

(29-11-2018, 12:13 PM)z3bra Wrote: The standard might even be too "loosy", because it only defines the minimal stuff needed

I would argue that vi, the editor that started this discussion ;-), is not "the minimal stuff needed" - ed is.

(29-11-2018, 12:13 PM)z3bra Wrote: Text is still a good human-to-machine interface (IMO, better than sound for example, or pictograms), and POSIX defines its standards around this interface.

POSIX follows a hardware standard that was outdated thirty years ago. "My" perfect interface would be a sane mixture between (a visually more appealing) Plan 9 and dwm, I guess. I learned to make my peace with the mouse. (However, the default Plan 9 lacks hotkeys, rio's missing ability to spawn a terminal without drawing a window manually can be annoying. I guess Windows has spoiled me.) Imagine an operating system that was built upon a graphical interface instead of wrapping the graphical interface around a text-based system. Many of the architectural problems of Windows "9x" came from the DOS base which couldn't just be replaced.

And as modern server hardware is incredibly powerful, nothing would stop us from using graphical remote control instead of 70s-style ssh. I understand that editing configuration files is mainly a text-only task - but using a computer should not.