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Become Shell Literate

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Re: Become Shell Literate

#261

Post by gfxgirl »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #47
gfxgirl wrote: post #29

Someone should write "become IDE literate" as a response to opening of using vim with no extensions and using grep a lot. I've been using editors that are language aware since at least the late 90s. Depending on the language they'll show me all references, take me to the definition or declaration, stack those jumps so as I follow the links I can pop back a level to where I was. All of this is instant. 1000x faster th…

Cool. Still, a lot of people start out programming with complex IDEs and end up being unable to run their code without the "play" button of their IDE. Starting out, or only ever leaning an IDE is also hiding a lot of things from you. For me, knowing the shell isn't about IDE vs. shell tooling, it's about, whatever you use, be aware and knowledgeable about the foundation and being able to do stuff even if there is no…

I entirely agree with you there is a time for the shell and a time for an IDE and knowing when and knowing both is a huge win.

My comment is more addressing the article where in the author mentions vim with no extensions and grepping. IMO that's often the wrong tool for the job (writing code). It can be a useful tool but there are often better tools for that job. Knowing when to use one vs the other and therefore knowing both is very useful.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#262

Post by noisy_boy »

Beyond the point of using shell and scripts as replacement for IDE/development, knowing the shell also helps with general productivity. E.g. I need to remote to office desktop and instead of having to open my phone to read the 2FA pin, I just setup stoken on my desktop and wrote a simple script that invokes stoken and copies the pin to the clipboard. Mapped the script to a shortcut and now I can just press the shortcut from the login page and do Ctrl+V for pasting the pin. Small things like these become very easy once you know a bit of scripting and the time/effort saved over time adds up considerably.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#263

Post by kortilla »

> I can work with this. I add grep '^ D' to filter out any entries which were not deleted, and pipe it through awk '{ print $2 }' to extract just the filenames.

Best hope your file names don’t have spaces in them.

One of the downsides of the shell on Unix is that everything is usually text meant for humans so you have to spend an annoying amount of time dealing with delimiters that make it easy on the eyes but a pain in the ass.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#264

Post by rubatuga »

addicted wrote: post #260
cjohnson318 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work with mechanical or electrical engineers, then you're going to run into Windows machines pretty quick, and then you need to convince them to install minGW to run your shell scripts. Sure, shell scripts are portable between Mac and *nix, but you're leaving out a large elephant.

I used git bash and it worked just fine. But now you can use Linux subsystem for Windows. I don’t have much experience with this so I’m not sure how well it works in practice but most people seem to rave about it.

More than once did I type ls -lah into a command prompt window to be sorely disappointed.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#265

Post by willghatch »

theon144 wrote: post #20
tutfbhuf wrote: post #4

I wish that shell would be more sane. I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language. If you need a programming language, then better use one. There is xonsh if you are looking for something like this. I think there should be a better bash with an very clean and consistent interface. Some of the most commonly used utils like awk '{ print $2}', sed, grep, sort, ... should be included out of the b…

> I wish that shell would be more sane. Absolutely agreed, shell is in many respects terrible. >I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language. On the contrary, I think shell should be a more complete programming language! Drop the stringly typing and add actual types (hence eliminating 80% of bothersome awksedgrep magic; yes, no need to tell me it's a real tall order), add proper error handling…

Since everybody else is peddling their better shells, I'll drop a plug for mine: https://rash-lang.org

It's a shell embedded in the Racket programming language. If you're familiar with Xonsh, it's similar, but both more powerful and less polished. It allows easy, recursive mixing of shell code (not posix compatible, but with a similar feel) and Racket. Its interactive mode is not polished (I need to write a better line editor), but it works, and it's great for programming.

I haven't worked on it much lately (I need to wrap up other things to finish my PhD), but this weekend I added support for user-programmable substitutions with automatic cleanup. As an example, beyond common substitutions like process substitution (IE () in bash), I added a demo “closure substitution” form that allows you to send Racket functions to `find -exec`. Importantly, this is something that a user could add, because Rash is super extensible and malleable.

Shell is a great DSL, but there are huge advantages to having an embedded DSL rather than a stand-alone DSL. Rash inherits all the cool features of Racket and can be mixed with other Racket languages (eg. Typed Racket, Honu, etc), has advanced features like first-class delimited continuations and the world's most advanced macro system (which makes Rash possible), and any shell script can import functions from Racket's catalog of third-party packages. Embedded shells like Rash allow a shell script to be copied from interactions like you do with Bash, but then grow past the “rewrite in Python” stage gradually with no rewrite -- just a gradual transition from being more shell code to being more “normal” code.

Though I'm kicking myself for continually not getting around to rewriting all the documentation, which is still very poor.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#266

Post by gfxgirl »

bentcorner wrote: post #44
gfxgirl wrote: post #29

Someone should write "become IDE literate" as a response to opening of using vim with no extensions and using grep a lot. I've been using editors that are language aware since at least the late 90s. Depending on the language they'll show me all references, take me to the definition or declaration, stack those jumps so as I follow the links I can pop back a level to where I was. All of this is instant. 1000x faster th…

I do like my IDE but my one complaint with leaning on it a lot is that it lets you write code that is harder to understand if you don't have that IDE readily available. For example, if you name a member "flag" and you have several types with the same member, your IDE can tell you where this flag is used, so it's not a big deal if you wanted to refactor or are trying to track down a bug. But god help you if you're loo…

I'm not really sure of your point. I can't imagine naming something "flag" but I can imagine "enabled" or "visible"

In my experience it's not common to name members/properties taking other classes into account so I might have a Window class with "visible" and Shape class also with "visible" and Player class with "visible". I don't think I've ever seen a project where they made those "someWindow.windowVisible", "someShape.shapeVisible", "sompePlayer.playerVisible" just for the sake of searching regardless of if they person is using an IDE that could tell the difference or just notepad/nano.

All of my experience is they would all be just "someWindow.visible", "someShape.visible", "somePlayer.visible". In other words, that choice has nothing to do with IDE or no IDE.

Is there some other example you were thinking of?

Re: Become Shell Literate

#267

Post by mannykannot »

saagarjha wrote: post #255
mannykannot wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least when you go to Stack Overflow or read the man page, if you find an answer, then it is likely to work. In contrast, if you go to Stack Overflow to find out how to do something with a GUI program, there's a good chance that the answer you find is for a different version than you are working with, and does not help at all.

Depends. Are you on macOS?

What is your specific claim here?

Re: Become Shell Literate

#268

Post by [deleted] »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #249
voidhorse wrote: post #238

I used to think this way as well, but out of necessity, had to work specifically with a commercial IDE for some time. Turns out, if you are confident learning the keybindings of a robust IDE is worthwhile (e.g. you know that you must use it for some particular project for a decent amount of time) the investment pays off just as well as learning shell commands. A good IDE can do everything a cobbled together shell pip…

"People like to pretend that learning shell commands is somehow better because it's more portable, but unless your work entails working across multiple machines and environments daily, it doesn't matter." It is more portable. No pretending is necessary. It's true. I run multiple computers with different resource constraints and operating systems. I neither have the patience nor the time (not to mention the system req…

[deleted]

Re: Become Shell Literate

#269

Post by filmgirlcw »

dragonwriter wrote: post #242
voidhorse wrote: post #238

I used to think this way as well, but out of necessity, had to work specifically with a commercial IDE for some time. Turns out, if you are confident learning the keybindings of a robust IDE is worthwhile (e.g. you know that you must use it for some particular project for a decent amount of time) the investment pays off just as well as learning shell commands. A good IDE can do everything a cobbled together shell pip…

> People like to pretend that learning shell commands is somehow better because it's more portable, No, it's better because if you aren't doing exactly the workflow an IDE or GUI tool designer has envisioned, it is almost invariably much easier to do it in shell (and then make it a script and then bind it to a command in your IDE or GUI tool, if they support that) than to beat the non-shell tool into, first, doing wh…

You missed the point that it’s about user preference. The shell works better for you, that’s great.

My setup is specifically crafted between my text editor (that has a terminal that I use all the time) and a few GUI tools that I’ve got customized and scripted. I like a mix of shell and GUI. That’s my preference.

You’re right that it isn’t as portable as my dot files repo (and I have one of those too), but I do actually have it set so I can quickly restore the whole config on a Mac and restore the text editor portion from Windows, or really any machine with a web browser.

If you are constantly using different machines on the regular, yeah, being good at shell commands makes sense. But it still comes down to personal preference and people who like other methods aren’t inferior.

Re: Become Shell Literate

#270

Post by filmgirlcw »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #257
voidhorse wrote: post #238

I used to think this way as well, but out of necessity, had to work specifically with a commercial IDE for some time. Turns out, if you are confident learning the keybindings of a robust IDE is worthwhile (e.g. you know that you must use it for some particular project for a decent amount of time) the investment pays off just as well as learning shell commands. A good IDE can do everything a cobbled together shell pip…

If you work with mechanical or electrical engineers, then you're going to run into Windows machines pretty quick, and then you need to convince them to install minGW to run your shell scripts. Sure, shell scripts are portable between Mac and *nix, but you're leaving out a large elephant.

Hopefully the next rise or WSL, Windows Terminal, and the OSS PowerShell will help that.

I’ve anecdotally noticed more people using or willing to use PowerShell in some scenarios, now that it’s at parity on Mac and Linux (there are a few things in old-school classic Windows PowerShell that don’t work on Mac/Linux but the future direction and support is all x-platform) and it’s certainly easier to get a Linux shell running in Windows than ever before.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on any of these tools.

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