Speaking of shells, I wish there were a shell inspired by python, able to conveniently use python libraries (perhaps even auto-import them), but with the convenience features of common shells. I can never remember the ghastly syntax of bash.
Xiki: An amazing shell
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Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#92Holy freaking crap that's amazing. I love how the video all of the sudden starts to show 9000 features/ways it can be used. Looks like the paradigm adapts well to many different common workflows. It's really great to see someone really thinking from scratch about the shell -- something that very rarely goes through any meaningful changes like this. I hope this project goes far and becomes the new default.
This reminds me of ACME http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) . To me it doesn't look like something new at all. The cool thing about this project is it doesn't interrupt how you use your mouse. Using acme makes you learn how to use a mouse again like going from vim to emacs makes all your keybindings screw up. Not that i'm saying copying acme is a bad thing, that editor is really underated.
I played with Acme the other day and was blown away. The everything as a command idea is really powerful. Definitely underrated, would be great if it got a modern reboot.
For the unfamiliar this video by Russ Cox covers it pretty well. http://research.swtch.com/acme
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suffer from the same problem of too many terminal windows and browser tabs, and honestly it doesn't seem to help me much. It just dilutes my attention. I always do a logoff or restart at the end of every day now, and that seems to help a fair bit. To keep track of what I need to do in the short term, I have a simple TODO text file.
Unrelated, but if you're using plain old text files for todo lists, you should look at this: http://todotxt.com/
Or the Org Mode of Emacs
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#94> “Originally I created Xiki for my own use,” said Muth. “When I was supposed to be doing my boring job as a software dev at banks and insurance companies in Ohio 13 years ago, I started making this thing that let me run commands and navigate files directly from my notes. Ever since then I’ve found myself unable to resist working on it. I use it for everything.” Isn't this a bit concerning? It sounds like this was cr…
Maybe he does own the IP outright. He negotiated for the right to create side projects and has paperwork to prove it? Or maybe he figures it's his because it's not within the scope of his employment. i.e. -- has nothing to do with banks in and of itself.
> when I was supposed to be doing my job
No negotiating your way out of that. I know lots of people have done this type of thing at work, but I guarantee you he didn't have anything in his employment agreement that said "If I dick around instead of working and get paid for it like I was working, everything is fine, don't even worry about it."
That's a fire-able offense for any sane employer that doesn't have a 20% time deal or something similar. Hell, most employers specifically address this in the employment agreement.
I've got 15% time at my job, and I still wouldn't do this unless it was going to directly benefit my company, including other people that work here.
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is already at v1.0 ( https://github.com/trogdoro/xiki/tree/master ). It has been under development for over 10 years.
This comment makes me wonder why he suddenly needs money for it now. Many huge projects started without kickstarter, even if they receive lots of contributions and donations nowadays, they never used to need it. Hmm, and I remember some post on HN a few months ago about why open source projects should not ask for money/donations in the first place. The crux of it was that they basically become a company then: they wo…
The TC post includes this quote from Xiki's author. "If this campaign succeeds, the money will let me dedicate the time needed to bring this next, drastically improved, version of Xiki to the world."
Apparently he's looking for about one year's worth of money to work full time on Xiki. Why he didn't do that before, I don't know and it doesn't matter much. But using Kickstarter he's able to be very specific about what one should expect to get as a reward. Example: 35 $ buy a t-shirt and 10 votes for vim or sublime support, no specific features. 2k $ buy a command for your company. He writes "See the Twilio command in the video for an example". So it's true that if you donate a lot you get more. If only companies from a specific domain fund Xiki it could turn out to be a very domain specific shell. However being strong on a vertical market could be a nice strategy. Unfortunately it's out of Xiki's control.
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you say PS is horribly implemented ?
Just a bunch: Doing really common things, such as "find the directory of the currently executing script" can only by done by copy-pasting a non-trivial 3-line function from Stack Overflow. In batch (of all scripting languages), it's "%~dp0". Cryptic, yes, but at least it's in there. Similarly, the internet is full of blog posts with 1000-word articles explain how "easy" it is to do something in PowerShell that should…
Here's the thing about PowerShell: the community is not nearly as strong as bash/linux/unix. There's also been a substantial amount of churn between versions. These two things (combined with the insanity that is Technet) result in frequently less-than-helpful Google results when researching a particular problem. More often than not the first Stackoverflow result is either flat out wrong or non-idiomatic.
It doesn't help that (as you mentioned) you can do straight .NET stuff in Powershell also, so even if there is a cleaner, native cmdlet available half the Google results for a given problem will be some weird .NET mashup.
Also, Windows has it's own bizarre legacy command line tools ("net", "sc", etc.) which predate PS and further convolute any attempt to find the "right" solution to any given problem.
In general, if you're using Windows 2012+, 95% of systems administration and programming tasks now have native Powershell cmdlets. There is very little need to dive into .NET or WMI crap anymore, thank God.
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#97These alternative shells always get me really excited, until I try them out. Then the drawbacks become immediately and very painfully obvious: - Some are extremely slow, especially those that rely on complete webservers / node.js / whatever as a backend - Memory-hungry. I've got an average of about 30 terminals open at all times. 50 Mb per terminal really is a bit too much. 10 Mb is the upper limit on what a single t…
Wow, an average of 30 terminals at all times? Just out of curiosity... what for exactly? Real-time monitoring?
I mean, why do you have 30 tabs open at all times? You move on to something else, forget your tab was open, and go through at the end of the week and clean them all out.
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#98These alternative shells always get me really excited, until I try them out. Then the drawbacks become immediately and very painfully obvious: - Some are extremely slow, especially those that rely on complete webservers / node.js / whatever as a backend - Memory-hungry. I've got an average of about 30 terminals open at all times. 50 Mb per terminal really is a bit too much. 10 Mb is the upper limit on what a single t…
I agree with this. I'm concerned with having to move my mouse cursor a lot. When it comes to doing terminal stuff, mouse cursors slow me down.
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can go a long way with bash; it's worth learning because it lets you glue tools written in different "real" languages together very easily, as long as they all talk text. There aren't many other languages specifically designed for process control, orchestration and piping. I don't like fish because it has almost no features, compared with bash.
I've never understood why anyone would inflict oneself with bash scripting. If you really need something portable you should use standard /bin/sh anyway since bash is not installed by default everywhere (I believe many linux distros don't even ship with bash anymore, but a lightweight clone called "dash"?). And if you don't care about portability out of the box, why not use... Well basically anything else? Perl, pyth…
Many Linux distros ship with /bin/sh being dash, but they also come with /bin/bash. A lot of scripts obviously depend on bash, so distro maintainers have had to either fix them to depend only on POSIXy "sh" or just put #!/bin/bash at the top.
The reason to use dash instead of bash is speed and to a lesser extent memory usage. The goal isn't to stop needing bash, it's to speed up boot times etc. Or at least it was five years ago when this transition was happening.
Re: Xiki: An amazing shell
#100This reminds me of the TempleOS HolyC shell.