21–30 of 168 posts
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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..
Amazing 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…
It seems like the way to go to use non-POSIX shell as the default shell without changing login shell, is to have .bashrc `exec`'d that shell when it is running in interactive mode. Regardless, I would really love to see bash-like shell that provides out of the box experience in the same level as fish.
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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'…
That'd be a tolerable graduated approach where you get benefits even if not every tool support it.
With "jq", I'm already increasingly leaning on JSON for this type of role.
It'd need to be very non-invasive, though, or all kinds of things are likely to break.
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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'…
I lean towards wanting all my tools to support at least one common structured format (and JSON generally would seem the best supported) these days. It'd be great if there was a "standard" environment variable to toggle JSON input/output on for apps. If you did that, then e.g. a "structured" shell could just default to turning that on, and try detecting JSON on output and offering according additional functionality. T…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
I lean towards wanting all my tools to support at least one common structured format (and JSON generally would seem the best supported) these days. It'd be great if there was a "standard" environment variable to toggle JSON input/output on for apps. If you did that, then e.g. a "structured" shell could just default to turning that on, and try detecting JSON on output and offering according additional functionality. T…
Maybe an IOCTL to put a pipe into "packet mode" in which rather than just reading/writing raw bytes you send/receive Type-Length-Value packets... If you put your pipe in packet mode, and the other end then reads or writes without enabling packet mode, the kernel can send a control message to you saying "other end doesn't support packet mode" and then you can send/receive data in your default format. Whereas, if both ends enter packet mode before reading/writing, then the kernel sends a control message to one end saying "packet mode negotiated", and which triggers the two ends to exchange further control messages to negotiate a data format, before actually sending the data. (This implies pipes must be made bidirectional, at least for control packets.)
Being able to do arithmetic right in the shell is handy.
$ echo $((1 + 2 * 3 - 4))
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I lean towards wanting all my tools to support at least one common structured format (and JSON generally would seem the best supported) these days. It'd be great if there was a "standard" environment variable to toggle JSON input/output on for apps. If you did that, then e.g. a "structured" shell could just default to turning that on, and try detecting JSON on output and offering according additional functionality. T…
Nice idea! Maybe this issue is similar to that of command completion, but could also result in a similar mess. Every command has its "-h" or "--help", showing the syntax, available options and so on. But since even that is not really standardized, separate command-line completion rules are written for every command. And for every shell.
Looks fully featured! Cool stuff. I think people are going to ask "Why?" and "What's the difference between this and bash?" Might want to cover that in your README.
The fact that there is a "Won't do list" stating that functions won't be supported... I don't think this is anything more than a toy to play with rust.
Amazing 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…
A new system and set of utilities. None of the Unix environment works in that world, and shoehorning it in would feel incredibly clunky.