It is no secret that to be a true Linux power user you have to deal with the command line. Many people actually prefer to use the command line. However, the shell — the program that provides that command line — is mired in a back history which means it has to work with existing things no matter how modern it tries to be. However, a new set of projects wants to replace most of your user interface stack starting with the shell. At the top of that stack is Cat9 which is technically a shell, but not in the way you probably imagine a shell.
A traditional shell lets you run programs one at a time, feed them input, and observe their output. Sure, you can stash the output away for later use. You can run programs in the background or in parallel, but that requires special attention. In Cat9, everything is asynchronous and results stay around until you deliberately drop them. It is trivial to grab data from a previous command or, for example, to switch to a directory that was in use by an earlier task.
According to the documentation, Cat9 uses Arcan which is painful to build (their words). It also uses LASH and, potentially, one of several unusual window managers. If you want to see what it can do — watch the video below.
You’ll notice that commands get tracked as jobs. A job number can be absolute (#5) or relative (#-1, the previous job). There are also special identifiers like #csel for the job that has the cursor or #last as ..
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