marcel VS busybox-w32

Marcel is one of the pipe-objects-instead-of-strings shells (https://marceltheshell.org).

Here's a blog post showing how to use marcel to generate graphs directly from the command line.

https://www.marceltheshell.org/post/generating-graphs-from-t...

Check out marcel (https://marceltheshell.org). It's yet another pipe-objects-instead-of-strings shell (like nushell). Unlike nushell, you pipe Python values. Marcel has no sublanguages (like awk, sed, ...). Instead, when logic is needed, you write Python code, delimited by parens. So:

    (USER)

It is a useful correction. This project predates the release of the movie: https://github.com/geophile/marcel/commit/bb6adacbb6b3a683ce...

Check out marcel: https://marceltheshell.org, and https://github.com/geophile/marcel. Both marcel and nushell start with the idea of piping structured data instead of strings, which is incredibly powerful. (This also applies to osh. I am the author of osh and marcel.)

Marcel (and osh) rely on Python types and language where typical shells have sublanguages. So instead of awk or find and their sublanguages, you just use Python. Instead of piping strings, you pipe streams of Python values.

Marcel lets you use Python on the commmand line. It also has an API which allows you to use shell-like commands inside of Python programs.

I wrote a shell, marcel, that pipes Python values instead of strings: https://marceltheshell.org.

It also does the inverse, allowing you to run marcel commands from Python, e.g. https://www.marceltheshell.org/scripting-1

Check out my entry, marcel: https://marceltheshell.org.

E.g., find the newest vlc instance and kill it (a command that an acquaintance needs frequently, for some reason):

    ps | select (p: p.name == 'vlc') | sort (p: p.create_time) | tail 1 | (p: p.signal(9))

Even in environments such as win32, we have https://frippery.org/busybox/ that is just fucking awesome. Staying the size below an 1mb while being extremely fast. Unlike the shitty python package which has 40mb archive size and leave breadcrumbs for me to cleanup all over my filesystem.

Win32 port is here: https://frippery.org/busybox/

Look into busybox for windows https://frippery.org/busybox/. Pretty bad ass even with it’s downsides of missing applets and such

Vim by itself means no supporting unix environment. It's useful to call out to powerful external tools not present by default on Windows. I fill that gap with busybox-w32. It's not a big deal once solved.

Sure, it's not necessary, but a few simple, nice tools (<600kiB for an entire suite of extended unix utilities) makes thing a whole lot simpler on a platform devoid of nice tools.

To operate on many files you'll need better tools than what Windows gives you. One option is busybox-w32 (important caveat: doesn't support unicode paths), which will get you some basic command line tools. For example, to gzip compress every file under the current directory, including subdirectories (leaving the originals behind with -k):

busybox-w32 includes a cal applet. If that's all you care about, you can just rename busybox.exe to cal.exe.

busybox-w32: standard unix utilities for Windows. It's a BusyBox port.

IHMO, even better is to just use POSIX sh in your Makefile and simply make it a build requirement. It's easy to obtain a reasonable sh even on Windows (Cygwin, MSYS2, busybox-w32), and to further support exactly this I include sh alongside make in my development kit distribution. This uniformity lets me hit all operating systems with the same Makefile. I use EXE from the environment to determine the binary file extension, if any.