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I don't know if this is possible or not, but i'd like to make a program that runs on top of a shell or terminal window with the following goals:

1. It can input text/commands to the shell/terminal
2. It can display the output of the shell/terminal
3. Allow for extensive graphical customizations (i.e. background images, transparency, font-support, etc.)
4. Allow user-defined macros (separate from the shells/terminals aliases)
5. To be as compatible as possible with all kinds of shells/terminals (at least the widely used ones.)

Any thoughts about how to go about this? I'm thinking one easy solution might be to constantly read/write to an intermediate text file, keeping all the graphical stuff/macros and other goodies separate. Anyone know of any shell/terminal parsing programs? Is it possible for a shell/terminal to read input from a text file? Any ideas, thoughts, comments, questions?

eboyd wrote:I don't know if this is possible or not, but i'd like to make a program that runs on top of a shell or terminal window with the following goals:

1. It can input text/commands to the shell/terminal
2. It can display the output of the shell/terminal
3. Allow for extensive graphical customizations (i.e. background images, transparency, font-support, etc.)
4. Allow user-defined macros (separate from the shells/terminals aliases)
5. To be as compatible as possible with all kinds of shells/terminals (at least the widely used ones.)

Any thoughts about how to go about this? I'm thinking one easy solution might be to constantly read/write to an intermediate text file, keeping all the graphical stuff/macros and other goodies separate. Anyone know of any shell/terminal parsing programs? Is it possible for a shell/terminal to read input from a text file? Any ideas, thoughts, comments, questions?

Try using pipes as in unix pipes. Then fork() and exec() the shell.

I would recreate the shell though, or plunder an existing one.

hack the bash source ..Check out uClibc ..busybox sources ...