Xiki: one developer‘s quest to turbocharge the command line interface

The command line interface—that humble little text prompt that‘s been around since the dawn of computing. It may seem spartan in the age of colorful, point-and-click graphical interfaces, but the command line remains the beating heart of the coding world. For many developers, the command prompt serves as their primary portal into their systems—the place where they run programs, manipulate files, connect to remote servers, and craft their code.

Consider these statistics:

• In the 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 41% of respondents said they use the Vim editor, which is primarily used from the command line.
• The same survey found that bash is the most popular shell among developers, used by 47.4% of respondents.
• According to GitHub‘s 2018 Octoverse report, shell scripting is the 8th most popular language on the platform in terms of active repositories.

But what if the command line could be something more? What if instead of just accepting preset commands, it could interact with you and respond to your queries like a search engine? What if commands could act more like modern, interactive apps? And what if the entire internet was accessible straight from your trusty command prompt?

One audacious developer has been chasing this dream for over a decade now. His name is Craig Muth and his creation is called Xiki (pronounced "zai-kee"). Born out of frustration with the limitations he encountered as a professional programmer, Xiki represents Craig‘s ambitious quest to reinvent the command line for the internet age. This is a story of ingenuity, perseverance, and one man‘s willingness to risk everything to will his vision into reality.

In the beginning, there was code

Our story begins back in Craig‘s college days, in the pre-Y2K era when "the web" was still a novelty and computers sported CRT monitors. Craig found himself in a windowless computer lab, tasked with mastering the arcane art of the command line. At first, he loathed the unforgiving, keystroke-driven interface—it felt like learning a harsh foreign language. But somewhere along the way, something changed. Craig began to experience the power of being able to exert total control over his computing environment. He fell in love with the command line, in the way only a true geek can fall for a piece of technology.

Over the ensuing years, as he worked as a software engineer at banks and startups, Craig poured his creative energy into a side project—making the command line do more. He created a system that allowed users to treat the command line like a search engine—just type what you want and hit enter, rather than memorizing specific commands. He wired up seamless connections between the command prompt and GUI programs, databases, remote servers, and web content. Little by little, he chipped away at the wall that separated the command line from the wider world of modern computing.

Craig built Xiki as a Ruby gem that could snap into your existing shell. Under the hood, its architecture centers around the idea of "command trees"—hierarchical menus that unfurl as you type, guiding you through available options and arguments. The magic happens through a novel twist on Unix pipes, allowing commands to stream structured output that Xiki can parse and display as an interactive tree.

For example, typing "ip" into Xiki might expand into a menu with options like:

ip/
  addr/
    show/
    add/
    del/
  route/  
    show/
    add/
    del/

Selecting "addr" and then "show" would run the ip addr show command and display the output. But the real power comes when commands can take arguments or open up interactive prompts for further input.

Craig used Xiki as his main development environment and note-taking tool for years. He showed it off to anyone who would listen, honing his pitch and incorporating feedback. After a decade of Ohio life—the same drive to work, the same cozy house, the same loving cat—Craig made a bold decision. He would move to San Francisco, the promised land of tech, to pursue his command line dreams full time. Xiki would either catch on or flame out spectacularly, but he had to give his vision a shot.

Evangelizing Xiki to the geek masses

In San Francisco, Craig embedded himself in the tech community, haunting hackerspaces and meetups. He gave presentations on Xiki at Ruby conferences, eliciting ooh‘s and ah‘s from the crowds. He released the code open source on GitHub, garnering over 3,000 stars and a cadre of early adopters and contributors. For a lifelong nerd used to toiling in solitude, it was exhilarating to finally find his tribe—people who would actually get excited about a slick new way to interact with a Unix terminal.

But Craig soon realized that birthing a new way to work wouldn‘t be easy, especially as a solo developer with limited resources. The command line is so fundamental to the way programmers operate that convincing them to change course is a massive undertaking. Many developers reacted to Xiki with puzzlement or indifference. Why invest the time to learn a new interface when the existing command line gets the job done? Some were downright hostile to the idea of tampering with their beloved Bash prompt.

Part of the problem was that Xiki was opinionated software, prescribing a certain way of working that didn‘t always jibe with deeply ingrained habits. It also required a significant upfront investment to fully grok its capabilities and customize it to your liking. Some of its most compelling use cases, like seamlessly querying APIs or databases, took additional work to set up.

Craig poured himself into addressing the biggest barriers to adoption. He realized Xiki needed a seamless graphical installer, better documentation, and the ability to integrate directly into people‘s existing terminal programs without a lot of fuss. He ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 to rally financial support, which succeeded in raising over $20,000 but consumed a huge amount of his time and energy. The tedious but essential work of making an ambitious concept ready for prime time stretched on for months and years.

All the while, Craig‘s bank account balance continued its steady march toward zero. The loneliness of solo development took its psychological toll. There were moments when the whole endeavor seemed hopeless, like he‘d consigned himself to a quixotic quest. But he soldiered on, sustained by his unwavering belief in Xiki‘s potential and encouragement from its small but passionate user base.

Xiki 2.0 and the birth of the "social command line"

After years of refinement, Craig unveiled his most audacious creation yet—XikiHub, an online platform that enables Xiki users to publish and share their custom commands with each other. Anyone can submit a command, from a simple script to a complex API integration, for the rest of the community to use and build upon. In essence, it aims to transform the command line from a solitary tool to a social platform.

This is a natural extension of Xiki‘s core philosophy—making the command line more intuitive, discoverable, and connected. With XikiHub, if you need to do something, chances are someone has already shared a command for it. No more scouring Stack Overflow and pasting code snippets. The knowledge of the community is right at your fingertips.

But realizing this vision meant tackling a whole new set of challenges—designing an appealing web experience, building a scalable cloud infrastructure, fostering a healthy community dynamic. It meant becoming not just a toolmaker but a community organizer and product manager.

To rally support for the XikiHub launch, Craig poured his heart into creating a Kickstarter video that captured his vision. He agonized over the script and fretted about his delivery. When he showed a draft to his friend Charles, Charles‘s lukewarm reaction felt like a punch to the gut. But Craig knew he couldn‘t succumb to despair—not when he‘d already sacrificed so much. He went back to the drawing board, tweaking and refining his pitch until he crafted a video that generated over $30,000 in pledges.

As I write this, XikiHub is still in its infancy and its ultimate fate remains uncertain. Craig harbors no illusions about the magnitude of the challenges ahead. Changing entrenched habits is always an uphill battle, especially when it comes to something as personal as the tools coders use to practice their craft. There are tricky questions around incentivizing participation, maintaining quality control, and building a sustainable business model that have yet to be fully answered.

But Craig remains steadfast in his conviction that Xiki is an idea whose time will come.
Because at its core, Xiki isn‘t just about the command line—it‘s about expanding the boundaries of human-computer interaction. It‘s about making the raw power of the command line accessible to a wider audience. It‘s about transforming computing from a solitary pursuit to a collaborative endeavor. Ultimately, it‘s about ensuring that the tools we use to create the future can rise to the occasion.

Zooming out, Xiki can be seen as part of a broader trend toward modernizing the command line experience for the web era. It shares spiritual DNA with tools like Jupyter Notebook, which allows users to weave together code, visualizations and prose into interactive documents. Or Hyper, an extensible terminal emulator built with web technologies. Or eDEX-UI, a science-fiction inspired terminal interface. The through line is a desire to preserve the power and simplicity of the command line while dragging it into the 21st century.

As a full-stack developer who spends hours in the terminal every day, I‘m rooting for Craig and Xiki. I‘ve seen firsthand how small improvements to the fundamental tools I use can boost my productivity and spark joy in my work. And I‘m inspired by the audacity of Craig‘s vision and the persistence he‘s shown turning it into reality.

Whether Xiki achieves mainstream adoption or remains an influential niche project, one thing is certain—Craig has poured his heart and soul into expanding the boundaries of what‘s possible in computing. He‘s emerged battle-hardened and a bit wiser for the wear, but no less idealistic. His quixotic quest to turbocharge the command line has already pushed the boundaries of one of the industry‘s most entrenched and essential tools. And for that, he deserves major kudos from developers everywhere.

If you‘re intrigued by what you‘ve read, I encourage you to head over to the Xiki website and take it for a spin. See for yourself what it feels like to wield a command line that‘s more intuitive, interactive, and plugged into the online world. Maybe you‘ll come away inspired to publish a command of your own. At the very least, you‘ll get a taste of what‘s possible when one tenacious hacker follows his vision to the ends of the earth.