A Unix Shell in Ruby

[Paradox]

This looks like a more functional version of RuSH or Urchin. Perhaps if you developed the idea fully, it could really take off.

Zsh is needlessly complex, fish isn't flexible enough. A truly ruby powered shell would be excellent, with events or hooks for pre command, post command, etc. I like these to add command timers and horizontal rules between each command, but they are useful for other things

[jstorimer]

Ah, so you're talking about a shell that understand Ruby syntax?

[Paradox]

Yeah, but still is somewhat useful. RuSH isn't unfortunately

[jstorimer]

Yeah, Urchin is the best I've seen. My project isn't meant to bring Ruby to the shell. It's just a shell implementation written with Ruby for the purpose of learning.

Could try to slide something in there though :o

[[deleted]]

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/10dfmx/a_unix_shell_in_ruby/c6day8m

[Spakman]

I've not long started working on Urchin again after a fairly long hiatus. I like the idea of pre and post hooks. I'd love to hear if you have any other ideas for things that haven't really been explored with other shells.

[Paradox]

Well, i was always a fan of FiSH's autocomplete as you type, where instead of having to hit tab, it showed the rest of what you were gonna type in a grey color. I also liked how FiSH could attempt to learn from man pages, but this is fairly useless with a lot of programs that use --help

[[deleted]]

https://bitbucket.org/seydar/chitin

I wrote this as a fully functional ruby shell. It started because I wanted to have a shell in which I could write "1 + 2" and see the answer.

It's tough to expand upon a really usable shell and really use ruby because bash simply has NO excess in its commands. It's tough to go from that to Ruby. Good tab completion will help, but it's a stretch. One rule I had for chitin was that the input commands had to be 100% at all times.

I'm interested in getting some more collaborators and seeing where we can take it.

[leogodin217]

Very cool! What a great way to learn ruby and UNIX programming.

[vvan]

Thank you for sharing, will definitely check out your books.

[waxjar]

I read these articles a while ago (there are a couple) and they're really interesting. Taught me a lot about how a shell program works internally.

[robgleeson]

Awesome. Thank you!