Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did you lose enthusiasm for? commando or HyperTerm? I've been toying with the idea of a "teaching terminal" for learning the command line as well, and building off of HyperTerm seems like a good approach.
A teaching shell might be more important. Something like what Reason does for OCaml, but done for the the unix command line. Use the model of something like is common with a lot of MUD clients, all text input occurs in a field at the bottom (look at tinyfugue). Below that have a set of autocomplete hints. This would be filled in based off of common usage, and knowledge of binaries avialable in the path, knowledge of…
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utop #
┌───┬────────────┬─────┬───────────┬──────────────┬───────┬─────┐
│Arg│Arith_status│Array│ArrayLabels│Assert_failure│Big_int│Bigar│
└───┴────────────┴─────┴───────────┴──────────────┴───────┴─────┘
and supports syntax highlighting and autocompletion, among other features. Similar to bpython in Python-land.