Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
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Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#2Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
Yay! Non-portable Unix tools! Just what everyone wants.
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#3Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer Yay! Non-portable Unix tools! Just what everyone wants.
What's not portable about it? Rust is reasonably portable, no?
Also they are claiming to be generally (but not strictly) POSIX-compatible.
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#4I was looking for something actually bringing a net positive... but the FAQ has answered my question
> Why another shell?
> Because we can. :)
It doesn't do anything exciting that I can tell.
This post would be more useful if it were titled as a 'learn how to write a shell in Rust'.
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#5Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer Yay! Non-portable Unix tools! Just what everyone wants.
Except, UNIX wasn't the first OS with a shell. There was at least 10 years of shell history before UNIX came to be.
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#6Interesting. Having the core terminal/language down is a good start. An important part of any terminal will be it's support for plugins/extensions or otherwise natively replacing them the way Fish tries to do.
I've recently started using https://elv.sh/ as my primary terminal after testing it out on/off for 2yrs and slowly porting old ZSH aliases/scripts into the Elvish language (very similar to Go which it runs on), coming from a decade on ZSH. There's a lot of opportunity in this space.
ZSH with the full suite of packages with autosuggestions and various other plugins (which I've grown fully dependent on) can get very slow on initial terminal loads, even with tracing and optimization.
Smaller tools like ripgrep and exa both written in rust help speed up common terminal commands: https://github.com/ogham/exa
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#7Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer Yay! Non-portable Unix tools! Just what everyone wants.
This isn't reinventing Unix, this is a (cut down part of) Unix. (Unix the family, not the original Bell Labs OS, of course).
And "non-portable" because it's only portable to Unix? That's... Approximately everything. Linux family and Darwin naively, NT via WSL/cygwin/etc., BSDs obviously, Android sorta-natively or via Termux, Chrome OS via Termux, crouton, or crostani(sp?). What is Unix not portable to?
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#8Interesting. Having the core terminal/language down is a good start. An important part of any terminal will be it's support for plugins/extensions or otherwise natively replacing them the way Fish tries to do. I've recently started using https://elv.sh/ as my primary terminal after testing it out on/off for 2yrs and slowly porting old ZSH aliases/scripts into the Elvish language (very similar to Go which it runs on),…
can you share these zsh to elvish ports?
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#9Discussed in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14675431
Re: Cicada: A Bash-like Unix shell written in Rust
#10Discussed in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14675431
Yeah, I submited once on HN about this project two years ago. Since then quite a few new features have been added and some improvements are made. So it's time to expand the user base a bit :)
Now cicada shell is still have some issues, but overall it's quite usable. I hope it could be useful for people who are seeking simplicity and speed in daily use of the shell.