command_help VS fish-shell

I use a lot of CLI tools, but haven't written many for myself. Mostly, aliases/functions and some scripts in Bash/Python.

Extract details for command options from man/help: https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help/blob/master/c...

cut-like syntax for field manipulations with regexp, negative indexing, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/regexp-cut/blob/main/rcut

simple calculator using python syntax: https://learnbyexample.github.io/practice_python_projects/ca...

I wrote a Linux CLI tool [0] that parses the man/help pages to extract option details. Works most of the time for me, but there are plenty of corner cases that don't work.

[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help

https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help to extract help text from builtin commands and man pages, ex:

https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help is big enough to warrant a repo, examples, limitations, etc. I had a list of todo items to improve the script, but after years of usage, I'm fine with the limitations since I rarely encounter them. This helps me to extract documentation of particular options, here's an example:

I wrote one a few years back (https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help). It has a few corner case issues, but works most of the time for me and supports multiple options to be retrieved.

I particularly wanted to lookup documentation for command options from my terminal (instead of the website), so wrote a script for it: https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help ... Have a long pending todo list, but despite the issues, the tool is good enough for my needs.

When I start a project, I usually try to write the programs incrementally. Say I need to iterate over files from a directory. I will make sure that portion is working (usually with print() statements), then add another feature — say file reading and test that and so on. This reduces the burden of testing a large program at once at the end. And depending upon the nature of the program, I'll add a few sanity tests at the end. For example, for my command_help project, I copy pasted a few test runs of the program with different options and arguments into a separate file and wrote a program to perform these tests programmatically whenever the source code is modified.

Reminds of the note at the bottom of Fish's releases. It's there because the build system cannot determine the current version for some reason. Hopefully that will go away now that they have switched to a different language / build system. The custom tarball is used by Arch Linux at the very least.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases/tag/3.7.1

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/7772#issueco...

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

A recent practical example of the former: the fish shell re-wrote incrementally from C++ to Rust, and is almost finished https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

An example of the latter: c2rust, which is a work in progress but is very impressive https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

It currently translates into unsafe Rust, but the strategy is to separate the "compile C to unsafe Rust" steps and the "compile unsafe Rust to safe Rust" steps. As I see it, as it makes the overall task simpler, allows for more user freedom, and makes the latter potentially useful even for non-transpiled code. https://immunant.com/blog/2023/03/lifting/

And this discussion from November has an update on the progress: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

We're using bash as our terminal shell for now (it is standard in many distros) but it is not the only one out there. If you want to test out zsh, fish or oh-my-zsh, you will see that there are a few differences and the features are usually the main differentiator. Try that, poke around.

They have a variety of reasons to move to rust, as outlined in their original rust discussion[1]. Mostly around finding other contributors, and adding an async/parallel mode they're comfortable with.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512