Hotwire is an object-oriented hypershell. It is a shell designed for systems programming (files, processes), and thus it is in the same conceptual category of software as the Unix shell+terminal and Windows PowerShell.

The goal of the Hotwire project though is to create a better systems programming shell than both Unix and PowerShell. Hotwire blends the concepts of a systems-oriented shell with a modern graphical user interface display. It takes advantage of your desktop environment rather than being a text box. It retains some advantageous attributes of a shell such as keyboard command orientation, interactivity, completion, and scripting.

From an implementation perspective, at the heart of Hotwire is the concept of asynchronous object-oriented pipeline processing. Layered on top of this in a tightly integrated fashion is a graphical display, control and introspection system.