You'd think PTYs would be standardised - I certainly assumed they would be - but the process of assigning a PTY seemed to differ from UNIX to UNIX and I couldn'

You'd think PTYs would be standardised - I certainly assumed they would be - but the process of assigning a PTY seemed to differ from UNIX to UNIX and I couldn't find any decent documentation that discussed PTYs in a consise, cross-platform, way. So started to look if anyone in the Go community had also played around with PTYs. The package I used was https://github.com/kr/pty https://github.com/kr/pty. The code to be surprisingly readable too. The problems I had was initially not even realising that many command line tools check if they're outputting to a PTY. This affected their execution behaviour. I'm sure this is all stuff you're already familiar with but a few examples I noticed were grep wouldn't highlight it's match, ls wouldn't output in multi-lined view and apt-get wouldn't give you many (any?) of it's interactive options. I also wanted tools like vi and top to function the same in my shell as they would in Bash but they couldn't without me assigning a PTY (I also needed to put the terminal into "raw mode" to passthrough sigkill and disabling echoing from STDIN - but thankfully that was very easy in Go) I've played around a little with GNU readline. It's a really nice tool but I had a few cross compilation issues in Go when porting it to other platforms (eg FreeBSD). So I used an entirely Go package instead - which isn't without it's own bugs but at least it keeps my shell fully portable. > A few months ago I started a thread with the authors of elvish, oh, mash, and NGS shells to exchange ideas. (elvish and oh are also written in Go.) I didn't know about your shell or I would have included you! Thank you. My shell is only about 3 months old though (possibly less as I only named it 2 months ago) so likely wouldn't even have existed when you started your thread. :)