DomTerm VS nushell

Completion for program P should be written and maintained by the "owner" of program P - and installed with program P. This is of course difficult when there are many different "shells" that each have their own "language" for specifying completions. A multi-shell completion library can help with this problem.

To me it make sense that completion for program P should be handled by program P itself. That way, completions are unlikely to get out of sync with the application, and the completion handler can use the same option parser as the application. A way to do this is to use a special "hidden" switch to request completion.

Specifically the DomTerm terminal emulator (https://domterm.org) handles its own completions. Bash allows you to register a command that handles completions for some other command. The following tells bash that to handle completions for the domterm command it should call domterm with the magic "#complete-for-bash" option followed by the existing line and position.

    complete -o nospace -C 'domterm "#complete-for-bash" "$COMP_LINE" "$COMP_POINT"' domterm

Sixel has the one advantage of being mplemented in xterm and a modest number of other terminals. Otherwise, it's a pretty bad format: Inefficient. Unclear and inconsistently implemented specification. All images have to be a multiple fof 6 pixel rows, which may not align with either image height or character height.

Some terminal implement some other protocols, but attempts to specify a standard have failed. There are some tricky issues, such as: When does an image or part of an image get erased? Can you write text on top of an image and if so how are they aligned? What happens if you write an image on top of existing text? On top of an existing image? How does scrolling affect things? What happens to the image on window resize or zoom? Can you reliably update part of an image?

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) supports images in two ways:

If interested in enhanced terminals, please take a look at DomTerm (https://domterm.org). It too optionally uses Tauri/Wry, though it can also also Electron, Qt, or a plain web-browser. You can embed images and rich text among other feayrures. DomTerm also has builtin tmux-like panes+tabs (mouse-draggable), detachable sessions, and a powerful "view" (selection) mode.

bash-preexec.sh and shell-integration.bash are copied from another terminal called DomTerm (that also offers click to position cursor) into ~/.local/share/DomTerm. Those files can be found here.

For people using or considering Mosh or Eternal Terminal: I'd love if you could try DomTerm (https://domterm.org). Specifically DomTerm's support for stable remote connections - see https://domterm.org/Remoting-over-ssh.html .

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) isn't quite what you asked for: It only indirectly has a JavaScript console: Since its frontend is a browser engine, you can open up a JavaScript debugger.

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) attempts to provide similar possibilities as TermKit. However, it starts with the position that it should also (and perhaps first) be a fully-functional modern mostly-xterm-compatible terminal emulator. On top of that we add rich html text, images, logical structure, "shell integrayion", and more.

DomTerm - JavaScript, Electron, Qt - Web browser, Linux (+ others?)

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) uses the Golden Layout library (https://github.com/golden-layout/golden-layout). As far as I can tell, this does everything mentioned in the article. It also supports tabs, and you can also reposition terminal windows by dragging, neither of which I saw mentioned in the article. (I'm currently working on being able to drag between top-level windows. It sort-of-works, but only at the proof-of-concept level.)

Please try DomTerm (https://domterm.org). The 2.9.4 AppImage (https://github.com/PerBothner/DomTerm/releases/tag/2.9.4) should have the needed support for grapheme clusters and hopefully work on reasonably up-to-date Linux systems. Of course there are more recent fixes and improvements if you don't mind building from source.

These are just three small examples of what this shell written in Rust allows. The features are many and many more, but I'll leave it up to you to discover and enjoy them; I'm currently playing around with it and it's giving me a lot of satisfaction and immediacy, now it has a fixed place among the tools I use when working! The project is Open Source, so if you want to contribute, I invite you, as always, to do so, I leave you the link to the repo here!

Any thoughts on fish as compared to nushell [0]? It's similar to PowerShell in its philosophy and is also written in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/nushell/nushell

> In PowerShell, structured output is the default and it seems to work very well.

PowerShell goes a step beyond JSON, by supporting actual mutable objects. So instead of just passing through structured data, you effectively pass around opaque objects that allow you to go back to earlier pipeline stages, and invoke methods, if I understand correctly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof....

I'm rather fond of wrappers like jc and libxo, and experimental shells like https://www.nushell.sh/. These still focus on passing data, not objects with executable methods. On some level, I find this comfortable: Structured data still feels pretty Unix-like, if that makes sense? If I want actual objects, then it's probably time to fire up Python or Ruby.

Knowing when to switch from a shell script to a full-fledged programming language is important, even if your shell is basically awesome and has good programming features.

Maybe if the "popular" shells, but http://www.nushell.sh/ is looking better and better

Yeah agreed, especially now that PowerShell is available cross-platform.

Nushell[1] also seems like a promising alternative, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

I also discovered an existing discussion[1] related to this topic which includes a link[2] to a "helper to call nushell nuon/json/yaml commands from bash/fish/zsh" and a comment[3] that the current nushell dev focus is "on getting the experience inside nushell right and [we] probably won't be able to dedicate design time to get the interface of native Nu commands with an outside POSIX shell right and stable.".

[0] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[1] "Expose some commands to external world #6554": https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554

[2] https://github.com/cruel-intentions/devshell-files/blob/mast...

[3] https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554#issuecomment-...

I appreciate what projects like Nushell and Murex are trying to address, but having a saner scripting language and passing structured data in pipelines is not worth the drawbacks for me.

For one, Bash scripting is not so bad if you set some sane defaults and use ShellCheck. Sure, it has its quirks, but all languages do. Even so, the same golden rule applies: use a "real" programming language if your problem exceeds a certain level of complexity. This is relative and will depend on your discomfort threshold, but using the right tool for the job is always a good practice. No matter how good the shell language is, I would hesitate to write and maintain a complex project in it.

And for general QoL improvements with interactive use, Zsh is a fine shell, while still being POSIX compatible.

[1]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/blob/main/crates/nu-comma...

[2]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5027

[3]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/9310

I found nushell (https://www.nushell.sh) to be an impressive replacement "bash" for Windows

In terms of philosophy, think "Powershell but actually intuitive" : Every data is structured but command names are what you expect them to be. I usually don't even need to look at the documentation.

I liked it so much that I also replaced my shell on Linux with it, so I have the same terminal experience across all OSes