exa VS fish-shell

Some of us don't want all of GNU's utilities; just on an as-needed basis. They're not as needed as they once were.

Many of these utilities have been rewritten in Rust and have more modern features.

For example, instead of ls, I use exa [1]. Or ripgrep [2] instead of grep.

[1]: https://github.com/ogham/exa

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

fish: A very fast shell with various customization options to streamline daily commands. I discovered it through this post by @caarlos0, where he provides more details about performance and the differences between fish and zsh. Additionally, I use some CLI utilities like delta, exa, and ripgrep. Here's my dotfiles for fish.

Hi! I use this: https://the.exa.website, and the package to this: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/exa/

I still use exa for listing files in the terminal. It's a modern replacement for ls with a lot of useful features. With icons, colors, and git integration, it makes listing files much nicer.

5. Exa

There's also exa

Yeah, I see what you mean, perhaps exa could implement this, in case they don't already.

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.

> 1. It's amazing that they're doing this as a gradual C++ to Rust rewrite, while keeping it working end-to-end, if I understand correctly.

Seems to me they're not doing it gradually at all.

> Another thing:

> We plan on not doing any partial-rust release.

> That means we would be doing e.g. fish 4.0 as fully rust and zero C++, and I think, contrary to what we usually do that warrants a beta. (Ordinarily we've stopped doing betas and release candidates because they simply don't get any testing).

> We also still want to do a 3.7.0 in-between release that is still purely C++, so we have a better jumping off point for platforms that can't handle the rust version. It would be 3.6.1 with some neat changes backported.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123#d...

It has nothing to do with Windows. fish doesn't support Windows. Their use of wchar_t is the glibc wchar_t (wchar_t is not Microsoft-specific) which is a 32-bit type and stores UTF-32-encoded codepoints. The Rust type they're using is also the same ( https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/doc_int... ).

More on the motivation behind the rewrite.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512#issuecomm...

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