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> I'd love to see programs communicate through a typed JSON/proto format that shed enough details to make this more independent, and get useful shell command structuring/completion or full blown GUIs from simply introspecting the expected input and output types.

You should try PowerShell. It's basically Microsoft's .NET ecosystem molded into an interactive command line. I'm not entirely sure if PoweShell can make full use of the static types that build up its core, but its ability to exchange objects in the command line is almost unmatched.

On Linux you can use `jc` (https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc) combined with `jq` (https://jqlang.github.io/jq/) to glue together command lines, but that's still two extra steps you need to deal with compared to PS's built-in capabilities.



I don't have a windows machine and I don't plan on having one.

I didn't know of `jc`, but it seems that using nushell (https://github.com/nushell/nushell) gets you a better experience.


PowerShell is available on macOS and Linux as well (source on Github: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell). It may not be as well-integrated with things like system services management, but the language still works well. You can still use all the command line tools you're used to on Linux, of course.

nushell does look interesting, though the lack of a .deb repository does put it pretty low on my to-do list.




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