Oh, bummer, I was really hoping it would support Windows.
Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
11–20 of 168 posts
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#12Amazing work! Between this, Alacritty [1], and coreutils [2], we're getting pretty close to a plausible all-Rust CLI stack. While Cicada is pretty clearly modeled on the "old" generation of shells (sh, Bash, Zsh, etc.), one has to wonder what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`), and terr…
My structured objects aren't your structured objects. In that use case why not use a dedicated program (like say ae python/js/clojure interpreter) to handle more complex pipes and keep the shell level primitves... Well, primitive. Text is compatible with all systems, past and present, and can be used to model more complex objects. Let's not add features to the core on a "why not" please.
The so-called "plain text formats" are also just representations of complex objects. Often these formats are ad-hoc and hard to parse correctly. Multiple text files in a file system hierarchy (e.g. /etc) are also just nested structures.
So in principle, treating those as complex object structures is the right way to go. Also, I believe this is the idea behind D-Bus and similar modern Unix developments.
However, what's hard is to provide good tooling with a simple syntax that is simple to understand:
* Windows Registry and Power Shell show how not to do it.
* The XML toolchain demonstrate that any unnecessary complexity in the meta-structure will haunt you through every bit of the toolchain (querying, validation/schema, etc.).
* "jq" goes somewhat into the right direction for JSON files, but still hasn't found wide adoption.
This appears to be a really hard design issue. Also, while deep hierarchies are easier to process by scripts, a human overview is mostly achieved by advances searching and tags rather than hierarchies.
A shell needs to accomodate for both, but maybe we really just need better command line tools for simple hierarchial processing of arbitrary text file formats (ad-hoc configs, CSV, INI, JSON, YAML, XML, etc.).
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#13Amazing work! Between this, Alacritty [1], and coreutils [2], we're getting pretty close to a plausible all-Rust CLI stack. While Cicada is pretty clearly modeled on the "old" generation of shells (sh, Bash, Zsh, etc.), one has to wonder what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`), and terr…
It seems a bit premature to say that PowerShell was passed over. The journey outside Windows has just started. Indeed, PowerShell is onto something. Such delight it is to work with. Especially when you start to build your own tools for it.
It's been 16 years.
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#14Note: Rust environment is needed for installation. Why?
A rust installation is needed due to you having to compile it from source manually. If binaries were to be distributed, a rust installation would not be needed.
Yes, I haven't provided the pre-built binaries yet. Maybe I should..
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#15Being able to do arithmetic right in the shell is handy.
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#16Amazing work! Between this, Alacritty [1], and coreutils [2], we're getting pretty close to a plausible all-Rust CLI stack. While Cicada is pretty clearly modeled on the "old" generation of shells (sh, Bash, Zsh, etc.), one has to wonder what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`), and terr…
You're right, I consider Cicada is the "old" generation shell. I intend to keep it simple (for speed etc). Like in readme, it won't introduce functions or other complex stuff. But still can add some feature for my own needs.
For modern shell, please check out xonsh: http://xon.sh/ - powered by Python - It's super cool!
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#17Amazing work! Between this, Alacritty [1], and coreutils [2], we're getting pretty close to a plausible all-Rust CLI stack. While Cicada is pretty clearly modeled on the "old" generation of shells (sh, Bash, Zsh, etc.), one has to wonder what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`), and terr…
The problem with modernising the shell stack is that there are a lot of things that depends on the current stack, be it the shell (e.g. see the amount of work it's taken for Ubuntu and Debian to switch to dash as /bin/sh; and dash has a pedigree going back to the 80's), or the upper layers (try to alias "ls" to something that acts differently, and see how many tools depend on parsing its output).
You'd either have to be very careful (e.g. feature flags guarding every change) or expect a surprising amount of things to fail.
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#18Amazing work! Between this, Alacritty [1], and coreutils [2], we're getting pretty close to a plausible all-Rust CLI stack. While Cicada is pretty clearly modeled on the "old" generation of shells (sh, Bash, Zsh, etc.), one has to wonder what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`), and terr…
It seems a bit premature to say that PowerShell was passed over. The journey outside Windows has just started. Indeed, PowerShell is onto something. Such delight it is to work with. Especially when you start to build your own tools for it.
Powershell made me actually switch to Windows. I was playing with WSL when it came out and learn of Powershell. WSL has some warts but Powershell means I cannot use Linux anymore :(
I'm hoping Powershell on Linux will soon be at par with the Windows counterpart (right now it's pretty buggy)
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#19Amazing work! Between this, Alacritty [1], and coreutils [2], we're getting pretty close to a plausible all-Rust CLI stack. While Cicada is pretty clearly modeled on the "old" generation of shells (sh, Bash, Zsh, etc.), one has to wonder what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`), and terr…
> like pipes that are essentially text-only
Pipes work fine with binary data, you just need to be piping to a tool that works with binary data rather than text e.g.
cat | openssl base64
Re: Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust
#20Oh, bummer, I was really hoping it would support Windows.
You need xonsh - http://xon.sh/ :)