I started thing about ram/vs/disk performance issues and
occasional pauses being the cost of the benefits of
swap space.

Here: [link|http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3202|http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3202]

The shell often "knows" what you are about to work on.
You sometimes tell it by command line completion. But
it could do more.

If the system load was low enough, it could preload your
programs and data into memory (as you are typing them) to
give the appearance of almost a pure ram based system for
most command line driven interaction.

As you type a command, your shell could examine your
history of commands and trigger the kernel to load into
the page cache the most likely program(s) that you are
about to execute.

Maybe it won't bother until it hits the space for programs
that take command line argument, but if your historical pattern
for 'gvim' usually did not include an argument, then it could
have loaded it before you hit return.

It does not need to search your path for new commands, only
those in your command line history. But it should keep a
rather large list since the goal here is to reload something
that probably is not in memory due to the fact it has been
a while since it was executed.

As you hit a space, it should move into data mode, trying to
predict what file(s) you are about to access and preload them
as well. Pipe? Back to program checking.

Load wrong? Need a method to notify the kernel that it really
doesn't care about certain loaded prgram / files.

Is this a stupid idea or worth fleshing out?

Be happy I don't write in ALL CAPS!

If this annoys you so much that the value of my posts are not
worth it, then killfile me. I don't consider this abusing you or
your screen.

I'm sorry you feel it displays poorly. Either it will leave a bunch of
space to the right, which is not too awful, or it will leave a bunch
of jagged wrapped lines when you wrap before the spot I intended,
and that would suck.

I'm comfortable at about 50-60 characters per line for conversational
text. Hitting return at about that point ensures it.

But if that causes jaggedness, tell me what your typical line width
is and I'll try to adhere to it.

Sometimes, depending on the web site, depending on the variety of other
stuff shown, the automatic wrapping does not work. When the text is
displayed, it ends up constructing a box just a LITTLE bit wider than
the browser. If I make the browser wider, the box grows to match.
No matter how wide I make the broswer (and I have a 2 screen display),
I always have to use the LEFT<->RIGHT scrollbar on the bottom of the
screen.

This happens in both Mozilla and Konquerer to me.

One (but just one) of the reasons I hit Enter is to avoid that. Others
include the fact I often write posts in gvim and then cut&paste them in.
I always have hard returns in there. Yes, I am aware I can fiddle with
the pasting to join together continuous lines and drop the hard returns.
I don't want to!

Tell me what is good, bad, or stupid!
Point me into area I will need to research before thinking about devleoping.
Give me the email of someone who might actually do it, rather than me!