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Marcel the Shell

marceltheshell.org

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Re: Marcel the Shell

#151

Post by wiredfool »

skrebbel wrote: post #94
larodi wrote: post #86

First of all - Linuxes and alike desperately need something like this shell becoming standard. And second - I always wonder how all these great minds who where throwing rubbish at Microsoft ever since... somehow forgot to mention that same company created important product called PowerShell like 20 years ago. And you know PowerShell is so good already you can easily drop it in any OS/X, Linux and it actually works. N…

In defense of the Microsoft-haters, powershell is a fantastic idea with terrible ergonomics. When they first released it I was very excited but, well, it’s just awful to use. Terrible Get-Finger-Twister -Recurse -Awfully commands, quirky aliases (you can type “curl” but it takes none of curl’s parameters because it’s an alias for Get-WebRequest-Annoyingly or whatever they called it), simple scripting things such as “…

Powershell (at least mac/brew) has opinionated colors, and they don't mesh well with white window backgrounds.

Even if you set the colors, there's error/confirm messages that are Bold or ordinary yellow on white.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#152

Post by pjmlp »

vetinari wrote: post #134
pjmlp wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fish isn't UNIX, and stating that Powershell just mimics existing popular bash/zsh means your not aware of Powershell capabilities versus bash/zsh. Since when do bash/zsh offer a full sane programming language, not relying in external executables, a full blown language framework ecosystem, ability to load shared objects and importing public symbols as functions, and interoperate with D-BUS (as COM counterpart) as if…

> Fish isn't UNIX, Could be, but that wasn't the argument. The argument was, that fish has nice auto-completion, and that could be done without $irrelevant_feature_list. (Also, by the same token, Powershell isn't Windows.) > stating that Powershell just mimics existing popular bash/zsh means your not aware of Powershell capabilities versus bash/zsh. So what does it better than bash/zsh in the area of code completion?…

Powershell is definitly Windows, being built on .NET and COM.

Powershell Core is less Windows, that I grant you.

As for code-completion, if you so insist, I don't see anything better on Fish that is so great about it.

I also don't install needless stuff like oh-my-posh, I don't need jumping rainbows and what not on my shell.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#153

Post by pjmlp »

mbreese wrote: post #141
9dev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it is time to rethink what a terminal is, and get rid of the restriction to be text-only? There is really no reason for that, other than Typewriter heritage.

There are some terminals that can display inline images, but those features aren’t commonly used. Why? Text works. Text is the lowest common denominator for working with data. This is why terminals are still primarily text based. This is also why stdin/out/err are also commonly text based (when the user is expected to view it). Text is simple and easy to parse. Binary data exchange formats (or objects) come in and ou…

Outside UNIX world they were relatively common in alternative realities.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#154

Post by jampekka »

9dev wrote: post #148
mbreese wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some terminals that can display inline images, but those features aren’t commonly used. Why? Text works. Text is the lowest common denominator for working with data. This is why terminals are still primarily text based. This is also why stdin/out/err are also commonly text based (when the user is expected to view it). Text is simple and easy to parse. Binary data exchange formats (or objects) come in and ou…

Is that so? Because the way I see it, there are a bazillion different tools, plus decades of accrued knowledge only related to massaging data into text and back to structures. How many human brain cycles are wasted to data conversion on the Terminal? Text is a lousy abstraction. It may have worked well 50 years ago when computing was limited to researchers on American universities, but the digital world back then has…

When the alternative is to fire up some mess of an IDE with some nightmearish COM/.NET/ProtoBuf/whathaveyou overengineering marvels, I take grep and sed every time.

Simple text-based structured data format (something like YAML) with possibility to embed binary would be the way to go IMHO. And of course one should be able to show graphics in the terminal.

But we're not gonna get it. Open source tol is being rapidly enshittified by corporate EEE with their badly overengineered enterprise crap. :(

Re: Marcel the Shell

#155

Post by croon »

skrebbel wrote: post #94
larodi wrote: post #86

First of all - Linuxes and alike desperately need something like this shell becoming standard. And second - I always wonder how all these great minds who where throwing rubbish at Microsoft ever since... somehow forgot to mention that same company created important product called PowerShell like 20 years ago. And you know PowerShell is so good already you can easily drop it in any OS/X, Linux and it actually works. N…

In defense of the Microsoft-haters, powershell is a fantastic idea with terrible ergonomics. When they first released it I was very excited but, well, it’s just awful to use. Terrible Get-Finger-Twister -Recurse -Awfully commands, quirky aliases (you can type “curl” but it takes none of curl’s parameters because it’s an alias for Get-WebRequest-Annoyingly or whatever they called it), simple scripting things such as “…

They are fixing stuff, but last time I used it (7.3) it looked like this:

rm -rf in powershell:

Remove-Item --Recurse

But it gets better! (worse):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

>> Indicates that this cmdlet deletes the items in the specified locations and in all child items of the locations.

>> The Recurse parameter might not delete all subfolders or all child items. This is a known issue.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#156

Post by flohofwoe »

larodi wrote: post #86

First of all - Linuxes and alike desperately need something like this shell becoming standard. And second - I always wonder how all these great minds who where throwing rubbish at Microsoft ever since... somehow forgot to mention that same company created important product called PowerShell like 20 years ago. And you know PowerShell is so good already you can easily drop it in any OS/X, Linux and it actually works. N…

> You know, guys, you hard-loving bash die-hards and sed+awk magicians, you should give this PowerShell thing a try before inventing the wheel again.

I did several times over the years, but it simply didn't stick. If I have any non-trivial scripting tasks to do I run a Python or Deno script instead (at least those run anywhere, no matter if bash, zsh, fish, cmd.exe, PowerShell, and also run on any CI system without hassle).

(PS: I'm not actually a Bash diehard)

Re: Marcel the Shell

#157

Post by JeremyNT »

skrebbel wrote: post #94
larodi wrote: post #86

First of all - Linuxes and alike desperately need something like this shell becoming standard. And second - I always wonder how all these great minds who where throwing rubbish at Microsoft ever since... somehow forgot to mention that same company created important product called PowerShell like 20 years ago. And you know PowerShell is so good already you can easily drop it in any OS/X, Linux and it actually works. N…

In defense of the Microsoft-haters, powershell is a fantastic idea with terrible ergonomics. When they first released it I was very excited but, well, it’s just awful to use. Terrible Get-Finger-Twister -Recurse -Awfully commands, quirky aliases (you can type “curl” but it takes none of curl’s parameters because it’s an alias for Get-WebRequest-Annoyingly or whatever they called it), simple scripting things such as “…

Yeah, it's in this weird space where the underlying technical direction feels correct but it's just too cumbersome in actual practice.

The awful text manipulation in posix shells feels wrong on a lot of levels, but when you're just trying to accomplish something quickly the "just manipulate strings, always" api is faster to actually work with interactively.

Powershell ends up in this weird space where it's clearly better for writing actual code, but the act of using it to do small interactive things is needlessly difficult.

This is why posix shells stick around I guess - they suck as programming "languages" but they're good enough to do the job, yet they're just really fast to use interactively.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#158

Post by queuebert »

js2 wrote: post #83
Too wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the output of find into another program is not safe due to risk of file names containing delimiters. You need to use find -exec. Good example of why machine readable output is important. Agree that the tutorial should showcase more and larger such examples.

Yes, I know that, but it's also exceedingly rare for a filename to contain a newline and using -exec is extremely inefficient. I also wrote that on my iPad. Typically I'd use a combination of -print0 and xargs -0 for anything more formal than a one-liner on the command line. The larger bug in my example is that it fails if any of the directories in the path contain a "." in their name!

xargs also is good to use on big argument lists because it can parallelize the processing of arguments with the '-n' and '-P' flags.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#159

Post by queuebert »

chaps wrote: post #90
plugin-baby wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This deserves a thread of its own! Is there any coverage of this case?

I need to write about it ;). We won that case just before the last election and unfortunately other things took priority at the time. But it'll happen. Just first need to write about my IL supreme Court loss...

I would love to read about stuff like this. I hope you'll post here when you eventually write it up.

Re: Marcel the Shell

#160

Post by liotier »

flohofwoe wrote: post #156
larodi wrote: post #86

First of all - Linuxes and alike desperately need something like this shell becoming standard. And second - I always wonder how all these great minds who where throwing rubbish at Microsoft ever since... somehow forgot to mention that same company created important product called PowerShell like 20 years ago. And you know PowerShell is so good already you can easily drop it in any OS/X, Linux and it actually works. N…

> You know, guys, you hard-loving bash die-hards and sed+awk magicians, you should give this PowerShell thing a try before inventing the wheel again. I did several times over the years, but it simply didn't stick. If I have any non-trivial scripting tasks to do I run a Python or Deno script instead (at least those run anywhere, no matter if bash, zsh, fish, cmd.exe, PowerShell, and also run on any CI system without h…

Except when scripting Microsoft products, for which one might prefer a Powershell library.
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