Please consider to add back the old non-interactive CLI Shell and let us have a choice

I love the old way to open the config file with nano /etc/whateverpath/myfile , because it’s open with Webmin build-in text editor directly and it’s very convenience to complete some copy and paste tasks for new server deployment.

With the change to the new interactive cli, I have to go into file manager to surf the file to open it.
Please consider to add back the old non-interactive cli and let us have a choice.

Thanks!

Holy cow. I could not have ever imagined someone would prefer the old simple command to a real interactive terminal. Never even crossed my mind.

You can use actual nano in the new terminal, which seems like what should actually happen when you type nano (I never liked the editor replacement, very disorienting).

But, Ilia has already (years ago) provided what you want…you don’t need to open a terminal to get an editor at any time for any file.

Try this:

Click in the search box in the left menu.

Type in !edit /etc/whateverpath/myfile

Bang! There’s your built-in text editor with the file you asked for.

You can also run shell commands from there (e.g. !ls /etc), and it’ll open the results in a new (interactive) terminal.

Joe, thanks for your help.
Type !edit in the search box work well for the purpose to edit the config files .

The new interactive shell without a doubt is good feature.
However, I still prefer the old simple shell because of the following reasons.

  1. The new interactive shell is not very friendly for copy and paste command, Ctrl+c + Ctrl+v no longer work with it.
  2. The new interactive shell is very slow in response. My ping time to the server is around 200ms but the new interactive shell acted like I have to wait for 0.8 seconds for every single character to display.
  3. With the old simple shell, when I have some really long command to run, I was able to copy and paste that command from my notes to the shell, use the mouse to highlight the parameters that need to be changed and replaced it with ctrl+c & ctrl+v.
    However, I am not able to do this anymore with the new interactive shell, I have to move back the cursor with keyboard and suffer with the long waiting time to moving the cursor to the right position to delete the old parameters. Then, I have to type in the new parameters by hand and suffer with the input delay. And if I somehow made a typo error, I have to do it again under a very lag condition.
  4. To be honest, I really love the old simple shell, it’s working very smooth on remote server and I have great experience with it. It provides some features and convenience that interactive shell unable to provided. Please bring back the old simple shell and let us able to set our prefer shell under the miniserv.conf.

Best Regards,
Kam

Joe, thanks for the released of the the new interactive shell, but it’s not my cup of tea.

Here are some situations that old shell works better.

With the old shell, we can easily scroll back with mouse wheel to view the long list results returned by command. It really useful when I have to run some commands that will return long list of results
For example, lspci ps aux , locate etc.

On top of that, we can use the browser search (Ctrl+f) to search directly for specific keywords against the long result. However, this function is now no longer available with interactive shell.

Most of my servers are running under Proxmox which already had interactive shell build-in.
However, I still always prefer to use the old webmin shell over Proxmox interactive shell, because it works much smoother on remote server and I really enjoy to use it.

I use the Proxmox interactive shell when I need to run some commands liked htop but in most of the case, I prefer to use the old simple shell provided by webmin because it works better for me.

Best Regards,
Kam

Solution here. Thanks again to Iliajie.

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