Things unix can use

Unix is very powerful because it is a tool-based expert system.

Real URIs: "the web" should be mounted as a filesystem with readonly access. One should be able to for instance run 'less http://bitsyblog.biz ' to see its html. If the protocol is omitted it can default to 'file://'

File inclusion: the contents of a file or command or URI can be included in another file. Upon reading the escape sequence the file is processed or command run and entered into the filestream. Punt on cyclic dependencies.

Real devfs: Linux used to have a cool thing called devfs where in /dev only the devices present in the system in real time were displayed. Some of this got worked into the kernel but there's still much non- real crap there

One real clipboard: There should be one canonical way to fetch things from a clipboard so that it can be a real stack. Now there are several ways of cutting and pasting, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The current X clipboard is also limited in size, which reduces its advantages when trying to paste command output to an HTML textarea.

Terminal buffers as files: Most terminals keep a buffer of previous commands, stdout, etc. These should be treated as "files" (though perhaps not on disk) so that they may be queried in a uniform manner. The buffers should be searchable and the output of previous commands should be referencable via history.

Arrayed history buffer: Similar to the above in aspect of unifying what a terminal is. Since you have the series of commands and their stdouts in a buffer already, it should be easy to access the output of a previously issued command.

Better implicit behavior: For instance cd <filename> should cd to the directory of the file.