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I recently built my own shell to better understand its complexity and how it works under the hood. I also implemented redirections and partial tab completion. W
by m00dy 2y ago
I recently built my own shell to better understand its complexity and how it works under the hood. I also implemented redirections and partial tab completion. While I get that writing a shell isn’t the easiest task, I still don’t fully understand why there are so many different ones. I’ve been using the default shell on macOS, and so far, it works just fine.
- jitl 2y agoSome people like nice things
- johnnyjeans 2y agodifferent tastes.
- Philpax 2y agoThe second half of this comment reaches the opposite conclusion to what I would have expected from the first half.
- t43562 2y agoThe original one (bourne) had a great number of limitations and yet as part of a standard it didn't see much change. Everyone wanted something better and each person had an idea of what better was. bash became quite common because it's a superset and its' offered by GNU whose other tools made up for many other deficiencies in the various commercial UNIX implementations. Then FreeBSD and Linux made GNU stuff the default and that was a big boost. I tried fish couldn't really be bothered to persevere. A lot of the things I didn't like about bash were because I hadn't understood various bits and the more I know the more I find it fairly powerful and it has a kind of consistency. I don't love it but I found myself suddenly disempowered with things like fish.
- mamcx 2y agoI go another notch: Why are so many different ones with so little major changes. If you experience the `shell` of FoxPro DOS or other tools you will see how poor are the ones we tolerate now. Is like we still live in the age of `ed`. (I even remember one of this projects have the joke that is finally a `terminal for the 90s!` or something like. Shells in common use a very poor things!)
- specialist 2y agoYup. Have you read Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface? It's an explainer and retrospective for his Canon Cat. I want more of that foundation, vision, concept. With the recent renewed interest textual user interfaces (TUIs), maybe this cycle we'll tact a little closer to that utopian future perfect omni-shell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin#Pioneering_the_information_appliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin#Pioneering_the_info... -- And another thing (I say curmudgeonly)... bash (and csh), the progenator of all modern shells, is just one realization. Iteration and refinement are double awesome. We're seeing crazy awesome new variants, like Warp.app, oil shell, fish, and so forth. Yea for evolution! But I would also hope today's youngsters take a moment to review the genesis of all the modern ideas we now take for granted. From memory, in no particular order: Engelbart's Mother of All Demos Raskin's original vision for Macintosh Nelson's Xanadu Higgins art philosophy of "intermedia" Xerox PARC cybernetics Atkinson's HyperCard etc. The founders had motivations, insights, and ideas. Necessarily limited or ignored by feasibility. It's worth understand their ideas directly, for better or worse, not just thru subsequent intepretations. With 60+ years of progress and gestation, surely there are even more tangents worth exploring.
- weakfish 2y agoIt’s actually fish that has that tagline :)
- pseudalopex 2y agoMost people reading this didn't experience FoxPro DOS probably. Why not say more?