Configuration and the command line

OK, so I'll admit it - I've used computers for well over two decades now and I'm comfortable with Linux, and I still don't prefer the command line. Oh, for some stuff it's great (like, power tools) - but I just have no head for remembering commands and parameters. I sucked at the Rocky Horror Picture Show, too. Always inadvertently paraphrasing.

It makes me a good translator, actually: what is translation but reading a German sentence and paraphrasing it in English? But for command line manipulation, I'm not your man.

However, in this initial stage and for the foreseeable future, Xlat will be a set of command-line tools. (And those command-line tools are damned important, anyway, so they'll stick around.)

Here's an idea, though. When I'm in a directory, I want the entire Xlat suite to know some important things about that directory, i.e. the termbase I want to use there, the customer's name and ID perhaps, I don't know what all, but I want an open-ended scheme to set it all up.

And that scheme needs to cascade. If a value isn't found in the context for a directory, we should check the parent directory (i.e. if it's not in the project, I want it in the customer's main directory). And so on.

Moreover, I want to be able to override things on the command line if I want to use an alternative termbase or something.

In addition to this, I want a session context to be saved, i.e. the last file touched and things like that. The next time I do a termcheck, if I don't give it a file, it'll pull the last file I used. That kind of thing. Just a way to make this stuff easier to use, while preserving the power and convenience of command-line utilities.

I'm not sure what to call the module. Config:: something, but both Cascading and Context have been taken for things that aren't entirely what I want. So it deserves some thought.