elvish

Nice, I've been waiting for a good modern shell to replace ZSH. Fish just wasn't enough of an improvement for me to abandon ZSH. This is an area where most open-source developers have avoided, as it's a "solved" problem, but it really isn't. I'm currently waiting on Elvish [1] to mature. It's written in Go [2], but they're developing a new language on top of it for shell scripting, which I tried for a week. It's a nice modernization and is incredibly fast but still very alpha. You don't realize how slow ZSH/Bash is (even without plugins) until you try a modern shell, and there are very few good modern shells around. Besides performance my primary complaint is just how awful coding in ZSH is. I've been doing it for years and I still feel like I'm running into walls constantly and struggling to write 'clean' code that isn't full of hacks an

A Unix shell that hopefully sucks less than more traditional shells: https://github.com/elves/elvish

Some terminal emulators / shells use some heuristics, but the most reliable way is to use a combination of a terminal emulator and shell that support bracketed paste mode. This article (https://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste) lists some terminal emulators that supports bracketed paste, and a zsh plugin that makes zsh handle bracketed paste in a safe manner. As an alternative to zsh, Elvish (https://github.com/elves/elvish) supports bracketed paste out of the box. When you paste anything that includes a carriage return, Elvish will insert a literal return instead of executing it. (Disclaimer: I am the author of Elvish.)

This looks really neat. There's way too little experimentation happening in shells. Most shells are a few decades old, and they provide incredibly poor defaults and tooling. For example, since I'm prone to making stupid mistakes, I always use a linter. But as far as I know, there weren't any well known options for linting until ShellCheck [0]. Personally, I've been using fish for a while now and I'm generally happy with it. It has great defaults, so I rarely have to tweak anything. Hacking together small scripts is easy, leaving very little room for error. If I have to do anything event remotely tricky, I use node with shelljs [1]. Now that async functions are available, it results in some pretty clean scripts. And although I haven't tried it yet, the pkg [2] tool allows you to bundle things up into a single binary. That should make certa

My super-quick checklist for new shells consist of only one point: does it decently support background tasks? It seems that none of recently emerged shells had that point in their design: - elvish: no (https://github.com/elves/elvish/issues/193). - xonsh: no (https://github.com/xonsh/xonsh/issues/1959). - fish: no (https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/238).

Looks interesting, but it's got some rough edges: https://github.com/elves/elvish/issues/364

FWIW, here is a pretty complete shell mostly written by me in ~18K lines of Go: https://github.com/elves/elvish

Shameless plug: Elvish (https://github.com/elves/elvish) is a shell with a rich UI. The idea of enriching shell's UI is not new though, zsh and fish are both prior arts.

If you are interested in a shell with first-class function, list and map values and pipelines that pass such complex data (instead of structureless bytes), you might be interested in elvish: https://github.com/elves/elvish Disclaimer: I am the author of elvish.

I've always thought about integrating this functionality into elvish https://github.com/elves/elvish but cannot cone up with a good syntax. dgsh has a good one, but unfortunately using & breaks its traditional semantics. Does anyone has some idea of a tradition-compatible grammar? Also, to nitpick, this is more accurately called a directed acyclic graph shell, or simply a DAG shell. The language doesn't seem to allow cycles. dagsh reads nicer than dgsh too.