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Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#31

Post by pvg »

LarryClapp wrote: post #5
gregwebs wrote: post #4

Great project! I am a happy user of warp.dev They are enhancing the standard terminal experience with a lot of features- some of the same ones in hucksh (they just added showing the directory and other metadata of the command in the history search). IMHO it's going to be hard to get developers to pay for a terminal when there are a lot of free options. Warp is trying to sell based on team collaboration features- ofte…

Thanks! Yeah, I've looked at warp.dev. Funny story: I heard about them from Daniel Martí, aka mvdan, the author of the shell library I'm using. It looks really neat, though I confess I haven't explored it much; dogfooding, don't'cha know. :) I felt a little threatened by them but also weirdly encouraged, since they got $50M in funding. It made me think that hey, somebody thinks a new experimental shell/terminal is a…

somebody thinks a new experimental shell/terminal is a viable commercial product; why not mine?

I'm glad people are working on these although as you say yourself, commercial viability is tricky. I like the non-SaaSyness of this but then I'm still left with having to:

1. change my shell

2. change my terminal

3. but not on Windows

4. rely on a single person for bugfixes, security issues, features

5. pay $40/yr for the privilege

None of these things are individually an insurmountable hurdle but they add up to a pile of friction. In the words of sales theorist J. Winnfield, "Well we'd have to be talkin' about one charming motherfuckin' pig".

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#32

Post by [deleted] »

mellosouls wrote: post #28

I couldn't immediately find the repo for this, and get the impression its not open source. Considering it seems to be constituted significantly of open source libraries and tools (which you commendably are up front about), I would want to see a lot more justification for why this is closed (e.g. those third party elements are only a tiny fraction of the product), and what significant value is being added. Or if I'm w…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#33

Post by jyxent »

mellosouls wrote: post #28

I couldn't immediately find the repo for this, and get the impression its not open source. Considering it seems to be constituted significantly of open source libraries and tools (which you commendably are up front about), I would want to see a lot more justification for why this is closed (e.g. those third party elements are only a tiny fraction of the product), and what significant value is being added. Or if I'm w…

The licenses for the three libraries / software they mention are MIT or BSD. They don't need to make it open source.

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#34

Post by jyxent »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #19
burglekutt wrote: post #9

Intriguing idea! I love the idea of having a database of the commands you’ve run and their output. I use tmux religiously, but it’s sometimes frustrating using a crappy interface to spelunk my terminal history and manually look for the various commands I’ve run amidst voluminous output. And of course it’ll lose that history when it runs out of buffer. Question: You refer to this as a shell, but it seems more like a t…

You can run atuin locally or synced for that feature. Atleast, that is how i have been doing it up to now. https://atuin.sh/docs/

You're missing the 'and their output.'

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#35

Post by seanhunter »

lucideer wrote: post #29
mellosouls wrote: post #28

I couldn't immediately find the repo for this, and get the impression its not open source. Considering it seems to be constituted significantly of open source libraries and tools (which you commendably are up front about), I would want to see a lot more justification for why this is closed (e.g. those third party elements are only a tiny fraction of the product), and what significant value is being added. Or if I'm w…

EULA https://huckridge.notion.site/Hucksh-EULA-5f69019f12a04487a9...

I see the section on "Fees". It is certainly a ballsy move to try to charge fees for a shell in 2023 when shells have been free for like about 50 years at this point. This was a "no" from me just based on the description of the web based point and click yadda yadda but it's a "hell no" from me baed on reading that EULA.

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#36

Post by pvg »

LarryClapp wrote: post #25
thisismyaccoun7 wrote: post #22

Seems like resh ( https://github.com/curusarn/resh ) plus a directory tab and unlike resh it isn't free. I like the directory history, but that isn't a $40/yr value add over resh for me. There are so many free players in that space (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31402095 ), $40/yr is probably a hard sell.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of resh. (They don't call it "re.sh"?) If I'm reading the resh page correctly, they search the history of the commands you've run, but don't store or allow searching of the command output, or do any of the other historical features hucksh offers. Also, it appears that all such searching happens server-side; in hucksh it's all client-side. If you have a fast connection, that admittedly wouldn't…

You can offer a discount if you want, it's well within the rules.

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#37

Post by [deleted] »

LarryClapp wrote: post #25
thisismyaccoun7 wrote: post #22

Seems like resh ( https://github.com/curusarn/resh ) plus a directory tab and unlike resh it isn't free. I like the directory history, but that isn't a $40/yr value add over resh for me. There are so many free players in that space (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31402095 ), $40/yr is probably a hard sell.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of resh. (They don't call it "re.sh"?) If I'm reading the resh page correctly, they search the history of the commands you've run, but don't store or allow searching of the command output, or do any of the other historical features hucksh offers. Also, it appears that all such searching happens server-side; in hucksh it's all client-side. If you have a fast connection, that admittedly wouldn't…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#38

Post by LarryClapp »

mellosouls wrote: post #28

I couldn't immediately find the repo for this, and get the impression its not open source. Considering it seems to be constituted significantly of open source libraries and tools (which you commendably are up front about), I would want to see a lot more justification for why this is closed (e.g. those third party elements are only a tiny fraction of the product), and what significant value is being added. Or if I'm w…

Correct, it's not open source. I did mention that it's a commercial product, but of course some commercial products are also OSS. Mine is not.

> I would want to see a lot more justification for why this is closed

I'm not sure what justification I can offer besides "because I want to try to make a living selling my own software, starting with this product, and I think that'll be easier if it's closed source".

We might certainly differ over price points or value added. Pricing is a bit of a black art and this is my first commercial software product. (As I mentioned in another comment, I'm happy to offer a discount code, if that would help and not get me banned.) Like, would you be happier if it were 1, 5, 20 dollars? Or does the price, as such, even bear on the open-vs-closed question?

I'm unclear on how you (or I) would correlate "added value" or "private lines of code" vs. "justification for being closed source".

Thank you for your comment, this is an interesting discussion.

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#39

Post by gabrielsroka »

pvg wrote: post #31
LarryClapp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Yeah, I've looked at warp.dev. Funny story: I heard about them from Daniel Martí, aka mvdan, the author of the shell library I'm using. It looks really neat, though I confess I haven't explored it much; dogfooding, don't'cha know. :) I felt a little threatened by them but also weirdly encouraged, since they got $50M in funding. It made me think that hey, somebody thinks a new experimental shell/terminal is a…

somebody thinks a new experimental shell/terminal is a viable commercial product; why not mine? I'm glad people are working on these although as you say yourself, commercial viability is tricky. I like the non-SaaSyness of this but then I'm still left with having to: 1. change my shell 2. change my terminal 3. but not on Windows 4. rely on a single person for bugfixes, security issues, features 5. pay $40/yr for the…

Say "what" again! I dare you! I double dare you!!

Re: Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

#40

Post by artisin »

LarryClapp wrote: post #10
artisin wrote: post #6

Here's my 2c. It's unlikely that many users, here or elsewhere, would be comfortable downloading and executing this Hacksh binary from your Dropbox, regardless of its benefits.

Thanks, that's good to know. I never thought of that as a stumbling block. I trust me! Do you think showing an md5 hash would help, or is it just Dropbox itself? Would (for example) dl.huck.sh be better? (I own huck.sh (and huckridge.com and several others) and have a site there, but don't have anything at dl.huck.sh.) I actually kind of thought that Dropbox would be better than my own webserver, on the assumption th…

Personally, my primary concern is security and, by extension, trust. My shell environment functions as the gatekeeper to my castle, and installing this binary would be akin to blindly handing over the keys, especially since the source code is not accessible. I'm unsure if it's feasible given Hacksh's requirements, but using Flatpak could largely address your distribution issue as well as my security issue.
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