a shell experiment

What if shells were a bit more powerful? What if they had more knowledge of what was passing between them than just text?

Some thoughts:

ls filename.txt | cat

... stream a file to cat

fetch http://google.com | cat

... stream a HTTP GET to cat

ls | grep .txt | cat

... cat all files matching .txt

TODO

actually implement raw terminal mode
fix standard process interaction (and make it work for e.g. vim)
allow for closing inChan from a command this is needed for efficiently doing, say, head: ls | head 10 on a really large directory shouldn't need to read the whole directory before it finishes.

since channels that are closed can't be written to, i think this will require a helper with an atomic var or something noting if it's closed.
arguments need types like the in/out channels have (for URLs and files)?
out-of-process communication for regular processes needs to be better
out-of-process with typed info somehow (some kind of JSON exchange I guess)
How do we resolve the split between stdin and arguments? Imagine: fetch http://google.com | cat web-ls-thing | fetch These should function ideally, but right now it relies on handling stdin and arguments together. That feels awkward.