10 ms·

Show HN: Nixar – New design of Linux command line

130 points by askucher 11y ago

askucher 11y ago
I am a developer. I have experience of working in different programming languages like C#, Haskell and Javascript. I noticed that all of them has similar library. Prelude for Haskell, Linq for C# and Undercore for Javascript. A lot of functions are common: map, filter, concat, join and so on. In daily life I need work linux shell and got the understanding that this kind of library can be applied in shell as well. So I rolled my sleeves and implemented the prototype. It would be great to read your comments. Thank you
- MrQuincle 11y ago
  Interesting. I am gonna try it in the coming days.
- mediumdeviation 11y ago
  Sorry to be pedantic but I presume you're not a native English speaker? 'Joyable' is not an English word, but rather the name of a startup company[1]. Perhaps you're looking for 'joyful'. 'Checkout' when spelt as one word refers to the place in a supermarket where you pay for the things in your basket. When you ask people to look at something, it's usually spelt as two words (as in 'check this out'). [1]: https://joyable.com/ https://joyable.com/
  - luxpir 11y ago
    It was probably 'enjoyable'. That was one fault that didn't stop me reading on. While we're at it though, 'Checkout' used incorrectly did stop me, however, because in the software context 'checkout' could refer to more than just supermarkets. I'd fix that one. Especially on a call to action. I'd also fix 'fine file'. Scoring grammar points could be seen as nitpicking, but I think in a Show HN situation, where fair criticism is welcome, it's helping to improve presentation and conversion rates. If some kind of 'foreign bias' kicks in for some visitors you might lose the conversion completely. Copy counts. In any language.
  - Lorkki 11y ago
    >'Joyable' is not an English word I honestly just assumed it was some new piece of web development jargon (like "RESTful") that I had somehow missed, and kept reading assuming it would somehow explain itself.
- ddalex 11y ago
  Nice exercise. But for utility - I have been doing the same things 15 years ago with the standard shell tools: awk, grep, sort, tail, head, cat, tac. Nothing wrong with old tech.
Gys 11y ago
Written in node means that devs will be the main user-group ? I normally do not have node installed other then on my Mac (not on servers, not on win-machines).
- creshal 11y ago
  Welcome to devops, where Node is the new Java.
  - merb 11y ago
    It's more like: Now that you learned to compile a BigJar / OneJar and deploying Java got easy, we got a new Tool for you: "nodejs and npm" now you could still try to get all the dependencies on the Production Machines.
jdkanani 11y ago
Interesting. It would be great if it can be integrated with bash/zsh without installing Node.js. I think you opened up server's root access to HN. You should use sandbox environment for such experiments.
skimmas 11y ago
site down, found this: https://github.com/askucher/nixar https://github.com/askucher/nixar
insanebits 11y ago
Looks really nice from first glance, would need to give it a try for a week or so to see how it really fits in my workflow. >In daily life I need work linux shell and got the understanding that this kind of library can be applied in shell as well. S Then why not sticking to unix command names? For example my most used command on linux is "ls", which in nixar is "fs" for some reason. Am I missing something? I would try to get it to be as close to unix commands as possible, if you really hoping to achieve linux shell feel. And it would be really easy to jump from linux machine to it. What would be nixar's selling point? Why would users choose it instead of cygwin or minGW?
- escherize 11y ago
  You probably don't want that. It's a namespacing issue. If you call some new command ls and it has a different API that is a serious affordance issue.
  - insanebits 11y ago
    Then how can you have "cat" and not "ls"?
    - escherize 11y ago
      Oh wow, rewriting cat.. that's definitely a mapping/affordance issue. I assumed cat was cat!
      - onli 11y ago
        I don't see cat in the list of commands (https://github.com/askucher/nixar/tree/master/commands https://github.com/askucher/nixar/tree/master/commands). cat is cat.
        vacri 11y ago
        uniq is there, though
escherize 11y ago
This makes me excited for some kind of cljs shell. I sincerely dislike bash syntax. I've looked into scheme shell (scsh), but it wasn't that interesting. There's already Planck, which is a quick starting cljs repl. If closurescript can work in excel surely it can thrive as a shell replacement/enhancement.
- pnt12 11y ago
  Have you tried fish? I really like it, both to script and to use interactively. Some examples: http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_loops http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_loops http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_command_substitutions http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_command_...
- bananaoomarang 11y ago
  The problem for me is that everyone (on Linux/OSX at least) has a bash shell, so investing in learning any other scripting language seems a little futile. Would recomend ZSH + zprezto or Fish for day to day use though.
  - AnthonBerg 11y ago
    It's nice to get your thoughts into form in a decently ergonomic shell like Fish and then port it afterwards to nasty old Bash. So definitely worth learning a better scripting language.
    - bananaoomarang 11y ago
      This is true. I probably waste more time thinking about Bash than is useful
    - masukomi 11y ago
      "ergonomic" I'm fairly certain that word doesn't mean what you think it means. It's synonyms would be applicable though: well designed, usable, user-friendly; maybe even comfortable, although that seems like it'd be pushing it a bit.
jamescun 11y ago
Maybe I'm just old hat, but all the examples given I immediately thought of their *NIX equivalent. This doesn't appear to do anything above and beyond what our current tooling gives us (except perhaps 30 years less development).
- escherize 11y ago
  I think I agree with you for most of them. However I'm not sure how to pull off 'turn'. And if you don't know bash extremely well I'm sure there's a readability win here. Not sure if it's enough to get node installed everywhere I go, though.
  - jamescun 11y ago
    I agree. I could see this being, for lack of a better phrase, a gateway drug for some to the full power of the *NIX userland.
  - rmsaksida 11y ago
    Most of these could be written as bash aliases, so not really a great win for node...
  - dexen 11y ago
    sc [1], the venerable text mode spreadsheet, has `pt' (transpose) command. And yes, it's a visual program, in that you operate on grid of cells. [1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699
  - easytiger 11y ago
    what is 'turn' ; their docs site is broken
    - HelloNurse 11y ago
      'turn' is a fun way to get an out of memory error on a large input. Looking at the source, there are no options to limit line length or buffering amount. A naive implementation of an amateurish idea, like all the other commands, but with a greater potential for suffering.
seqizz 11y ago
Well, they closed the terminal after echoing a file under /tmp :) That was a bad idea (to give internet a free terminal to "huck").
seivui 11y ago
I don not understand this. My only question is why? This seems to be one of these tools the author thinks is really good, but in the end nobody will use a tool like this.
- betimsl 11y ago
  Not to mention dependencies it will make you install.
mickgardner 11y ago
This is node.js? no. Golang/C/C++ I can handle, but I'm NOT installing node.js just for this.
- enibundo 11y ago
  Exactly my thought. Apart from the fact that it doesn't add anything to my existent Tool-chain at the moment.
- martiuk 11y ago
  I don't know what it is with node.js but people seem to want to reinvent everything with it.
  - archimedes_owl 11y ago
    Hipster hubris? The "cool kids" crowd that jumped from PHP to RoR to node.js. Please don't follow the hype: many of this tools will be abandoned when a new framework/language comes out and this will leave the Unix userspace more fragmented.
  - Already__Taken 11y ago
    npm install myproject On mac, windows and anything nix + arm is a very compelling proposition. I'm not trying to say this is unique to node. It is what it is.
  - easytiger 11y ago
    CV padding
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    It's possible that if this were the case for some other platform, that would be seen as positive.
  - jeremy_wiebe 11y ago
    Maybe it's just that that's the tooling/language that the author knows. I've been guilty of writing a tool in the language I'm most familiar with whether the greater community thought it was a good idea or not.
bechampion 11y ago
grep cat df du ... not that complicated come on..
kluck 11y ago
I would really be interested in the Nixar commands beeing implemented as normal bash alias commands.
interpol_p 11y ago
Seems a bit buggy. I just tried `show` on a plist file and got <dict> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>English</string> <key>CFBundleIconFile</key> (Actual contents obviously are): <dict> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>English</string> <key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
lambo_fanboy 11y ago
its really handy, great work
theknarf 11y ago
If you really want an shell written in Node, why not go all the way and choose both a shell and a terminal written in it. https://github.com/black-screen/black-screen https://github.com/black-screen/black-screen
reitanqild 11y ago
Tried to play my favourite game of "find the license" but couldn't. Anyone else found it?
- pas 11y ago
  https://github.com/askucher/nixar/blob/master/package.json#L57 https://github.com/askucher/nixar/blob/master/package.json#L... seems to be MIT
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
I don't see anyone using this except people who want Javascript everywhere. It really doesn't provide anything for anyone else beyond what the established shells are doing that I can see.
ucaetano 11y ago
On the article: replace "Checkout all commands" with "Check out...". The first is a noun, the second is a verb.
rolandukor 11y ago
In same directory time ls -al | awk '{print $1,$3}' real 0m0.008s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s time ls -al | col 1 3 real 0m1.690s user 0m1.143s sys 0m0.173s While I appreciate the effort, it seems to me that this decreases the snappiness of the unix terminal experience for not much gain.
jaxgeller 11y ago
Another example of Atwoods Law, 'any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.'
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  These are all basic CLI and text processing tools, so it's not something all that grandiose to do in Node.
drinchev 11y ago
It would be far more reasonable if "nixar" was a set of aliases or just a bunch of bash scripts ... something like alias count='wc -l' or echo "#bin/sh\nsed \"1, \$1d\"" > drop chmod +x ./drop cat file | drop 5
racl101 11y ago
Demo seems kinda slow, and the text harder to read. It does look nice I suppose, but I'm more interested in getting stuff done quickly.
anonfunction 11y ago
I'd love to have some sort of spec to implement this in Go. I'll just go by the source but I love the simplicity compared to the standard Linux commands.

130 points by askucher 11y ago

I am a developer. I have experience of working in different programming languages like C#, Haskell and Javascript. I noticed that all of them has similar library. Prelude for Haskell, Linq for C# and Undercore for Javascript. A lot of functions are common: map, filter, concat, join and so on. In daily life I need work linux shell and got the understanding that this kind of library can be applied in shell as well. So I rolled my sleeves and implemented the prototype. It would be great to read your comments. Thank you

MrQuincle 11y ago
Interesting. I am gonna try it in the coming days.
mediumdeviation 11y ago
Sorry to be pedantic but I presume you're not a native English speaker? 'Joyable' is not an English word, but rather the name of a startup company[1]. Perhaps you're looking for 'joyful'. 'Checkout' when spelt as one word refers to the place in a supermarket where you pay for the things in your basket. When you ask people to look at something, it's usually spelt as two words (as in 'check this out'). [1]: https://joyable.com/ https://joyable.com/
- luxpir 11y ago
  It was probably 'enjoyable'. That was one fault that didn't stop me reading on. While we're at it though, 'Checkout' used incorrectly did stop me, however, because in the software context 'checkout' could refer to more than just supermarkets. I'd fix that one. Especially on a call to action. I'd also fix 'fine file'. Scoring grammar points could be seen as nitpicking, but I think in a Show HN situation, where fair criticism is welcome, it's helping to improve presentation and conversion rates. If some kind of 'foreign bias' kicks in for some visitors you might lose the conversion completely. Copy counts. In any language.
- Lorkki 11y ago
  >'Joyable' is not an English word I honestly just assumed it was some new piece of web development jargon (like "RESTful") that I had somehow missed, and kept reading assuming it would somehow explain itself.
ddalex 11y ago
Nice exercise. But for utility - I have been doing the same things 15 years ago with the standard shell tools: awk, grep, sort, tail, head, cat, tac. Nothing wrong with old tech.

Gys 11y ago

Written in node means that devs will be the main user-group ? I normally do not have node installed other then on my Mac (not on servers, not on win-machines).

creshal 11y ago
Welcome to devops, where Node is the new Java.
- merb 11y ago
  It's more like: Now that you learned to compile a BigJar / OneJar and deploying Java got easy, we got a new Tool for you: "nodejs and npm" now you could still try to get all the dependencies on the Production Machines.

jdkanani 11y ago

Interesting. It would be great if it can be integrated with bash/zsh without installing Node.js. I think you opened up server's root access to HN. You should use sandbox environment for such experiments.

skimmas 11y ago

site down, found this: https://github.com/askucher/nixar https://github.com/askucher/nixar

insanebits 11y ago

Looks really nice from first glance, would need to give it a try for a week or so to see how it really fits in my workflow. >In daily life I need work linux shell and got the understanding that this kind of library can be applied in shell as well. S Then why not sticking to unix command names? For example my most used command on linux is "ls", which in nixar is "fs" for some reason. Am I missing something? I would try to get it to be as close to unix commands as possible, if you really hoping to achieve linux shell feel. And it would be really easy to jump from linux machine to it. What would be nixar's selling point? Why would users choose it instead of cygwin or minGW?

escherize 11y ago
You probably don't want that. It's a namespacing issue. If you call some new command ls and it has a different API that is a serious affordance issue.
- insanebits 11y ago
  Then how can you have "cat" and not "ls"?
  - escherize 11y ago
    Oh wow, rewriting cat.. that's definitely a mapping/affordance issue. I assumed cat was cat!
    - onli 11y ago
      I don't see cat in the list of commands (https://github.com/askucher/nixar/tree/master/commands https://github.com/askucher/nixar/tree/master/commands). cat is cat.
      - vacri 11y ago
        uniq is there, though

escherize 11y ago

This makes me excited for some kind of cljs shell. I sincerely dislike bash syntax. I've looked into scheme shell (scsh), but it wasn't that interesting. There's already Planck, which is a quick starting cljs repl. If closurescript can work in excel surely it can thrive as a shell replacement/enhancement.

pnt12 11y ago
Have you tried fish? I really like it, both to script and to use interactively. Some examples: http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_loops http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_loops http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_command_substitutions http://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#tut_command_...
bananaoomarang 11y ago
The problem for me is that everyone (on Linux/OSX at least) has a bash shell, so investing in learning any other scripting language seems a little futile. Would recomend ZSH + zprezto or Fish for day to day use though.
- AnthonBerg 11y ago
  It's nice to get your thoughts into form in a decently ergonomic shell like Fish and then port it afterwards to nasty old Bash. So definitely worth learning a better scripting language.
  - bananaoomarang 11y ago
    This is true. I probably waste more time thinking about Bash than is useful
  - masukomi 11y ago
    "ergonomic" I'm fairly certain that word doesn't mean what you think it means. It's synonyms would be applicable though: well designed, usable, user-friendly; maybe even comfortable, although that seems like it'd be pushing it a bit.

jamescun 11y ago

Maybe I'm just old hat, but all the examples given I immediately thought of their *NIX equivalent. This doesn't appear to do anything above and beyond what our current tooling gives us (except perhaps 30 years less development).

escherize 11y ago
I think I agree with you for most of them. However I'm not sure how to pull off 'turn'. And if you don't know bash extremely well I'm sure there's a readability win here. Not sure if it's enough to get node installed everywhere I go, though.
- jamescun 11y ago
  I agree. I could see this being, for lack of a better phrase, a gateway drug for some to the full power of the *NIX userland.
- rmsaksida 11y ago
  Most of these could be written as bash aliases, so not really a great win for node...
- dexen 11y ago
  sc [1], the venerable text mode spreadsheet, has `pt' (transpose) command. And yes, it's a visual program, in that you operate on grid of cells. [1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699
- easytiger 11y ago
  what is 'turn' ; their docs site is broken
  - HelloNurse 11y ago
    'turn' is a fun way to get an out of memory error on a large input. Looking at the source, there are no options to limit line length or buffering amount. A naive implementation of an amateurish idea, like all the other commands, but with a greater potential for suffering.

seqizz 11y ago

Well, they closed the terminal after echoing a file under /tmp :) That was a bad idea (to give internet a free terminal to "huck").

seivui 11y ago

I don not understand this. My only question is why? This seems to be one of these tools the author thinks is really good, but in the end nobody will use a tool like this.

betimsl 11y ago
Not to mention dependencies it will make you install.

mickgardner 11y ago

This is node.js? no. Golang/C/C++ I can handle, but I'm NOT installing node.js just for this.

enibundo 11y ago
Exactly my thought. Apart from the fact that it doesn't add anything to my existent Tool-chain at the moment.
martiuk 11y ago
I don't know what it is with node.js but people seem to want to reinvent everything with it.
- archimedes_owl 11y ago
  Hipster hubris? The "cool kids" crowd that jumped from PHP to RoR to node.js. Please don't follow the hype: many of this tools will be abandoned when a new framework/language comes out and this will leave the Unix userspace more fragmented.
- Already__Taken 11y ago
  npm install myproject On mac, windows and anything nix + arm is a very compelling proposition. I'm not trying to say this is unique to node. It is what it is.
- easytiger 11y ago
  CV padding
- jessaustin 11y ago
  It's possible that if this were the case for some other platform, that would be seen as positive.
- jeremy_wiebe 11y ago
  Maybe it's just that that's the tooling/language that the author knows. I've been guilty of writing a tool in the language I'm most familiar with whether the greater community thought it was a good idea or not.

bechampion 11y ago

grep cat df du ... not that complicated come on..

kluck 11y ago

I would really be interested in the Nixar commands beeing implemented as normal bash alias commands.

interpol_p 11y ago

Seems a bit buggy. I just tried `show` on a plist file and got <dict> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>English</string> <key>CFBundleIconFile</key> (Actual contents obviously are): <dict> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>English</string> <key>CFBundleIconFile</key>

lambo_fanboy 11y ago

its really handy, great work

theknarf 11y ago

If you really want an shell written in Node, why not go all the way and choose both a shell and a terminal written in it. https://github.com/black-screen/black-screen https://github.com/black-screen/black-screen

reitanqild 11y ago

Tried to play my favourite game of "find the license" but couldn't. Anyone else found it?

pas 11y ago
https://github.com/askucher/nixar/blob/master/package.json#L57 https://github.com/askucher/nixar/blob/master/package.json#L... seems to be MIT

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

I don't see anyone using this except people who want Javascript everywhere. It really doesn't provide anything for anyone else beyond what the established shells are doing that I can see.

ucaetano 11y ago

On the article: replace "Checkout all commands" with "Check out...". The first is a noun, the second is a verb.

rolandukor 11y ago

In same directory time ls -al | awk '{print $1,$3}' real 0m0.008s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.004s time ls -al | col 1 3 real 0m1.690s user 0m1.143s sys 0m0.173s While I appreciate the effort, it seems to me that this decreases the snappiness of the unix terminal experience for not much gain.

jaxgeller 11y ago

Another example of Atwoods Law, 'any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.'

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
These are all basic CLI and text processing tools, so it's not something all that grandiose to do in Node.

drinchev 11y ago

It would be far more reasonable if "nixar" was a set of aliases or just a bunch of bash scripts ... something like alias count='wc -l' or echo "#bin/sh\nsed \"1, \$1d\"" > drop chmod +x ./drop cat file | drop 5

racl101 11y ago

Demo seems kinda slow, and the text harder to read. It does look nice I suppose, but I'm more interested in getting stuff done quickly.

anonfunction 11y ago

I'd love to have some sort of spec to implement this in Go. I'll just go by the source but I love the simplicity compared to the standard Linux commands.