Comment by Decabytes

It's just such a pain in the butt to work with files with spaces. In a script it's fine b/c I just surround it in double quotes, but on the command line I hate having to escape the spaces.

This might already exist, but I wonder about a terminal that was really just a multi-line repl to a language. It would be preloaded with libraries that replicated all the features of the gnu core utils, but instead of calling grep like normal, you called a function like grep("args"). The advantage would be that you had access to a full blown programming language at all times. So when you needed to do something more complicated you would still have access to all the standard language features. And when you didn't need that, your canned core utils like functions would work