jexer VS nushell

Very interesting! I was thinking literally yesterday about a TUI/GUI Qubes type concept, maybe also applicable for industrial type data diodes.

I did something like that once. Is your project online somewhere? I'm always curious what else is going on. :)

When I transliterated from D to Java around 2015, Java wasn't quite the "uninteresting" language it is perceived to be today. But all along I had hoped others might pick up some tricks, and put some notes on porting it here. Yet Java's been a pretty solid workhorse for me, and having the Swing GUI to test on was a godsend actually once I got into images.

If you code in Java, and like TUI (console type applications), then you might enjoy Jexer: https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer

I started Jexer in 2013, and off-and-on it's gotten better. I think my favorite part has been crossing paths with other terminal emulator ecosystem folks over the last few years. This release brings a few prettified effects inspired by other projects that you are all hopefully quite familiar with (notcurses, chafa, and vtm):

* Translucent windows, including images under/over each other and text.

* Animated/pulsing text

* Animated gifs

* A new XtermVideoPlayer example that uses ffmpeg/JavaCV to play movies inside a text-draggable window. (No audio though.)

* New button styles: round, diamond, left/right arrows. The button ends and shadows are drawn with images so specific font support is not required.

* A _much_ faster and _much_ higher quality sixel encoder.

* Different window border styles: single, double, none, and rounded corners.

* A femme theme option.

Some screenshots are posted here: https://twitter.com/AutumnMeowMeow/status/148922891703050240...

It's on maven and Sourceforge.

If you code in Java, and like TUI (console type applications), and enjoy transfemme in-jokes, then you might also enjoy jexer.

A path that started in the BBS era and is currently bringing DOOM to Xterm. And ironically, there is much better support for this now than there ever was for RIPscript.

Story time: when I first posted Jexer to Reddit, people were all "twin does that". No, it does not. twin does not pass vttest. twin has almost no widgets. twin does not support images at all, it does not multiplex images, it does not multihead images, and it does not play videos (a bit too slowly but still) in a text draggable/resizable window that could be part of a larger system. mpv/mplayer doesn't do those things either. In fact, the only two projects I know of that can do these kinds of tricks are Jexer and notcurses. (And notcurses is hella faster and great, and I would have used it in 2013 when I started Jexer, but it didn't exist then.)

One way to do translucent windows. - Inspired by notcurses

foot is great, dnkl is great. It's so far the fastest sixel-supporting terminal I've got to test XtermDOOM on. (I run iTerm2-based images against wezterm.)

It parses them, but then reduces to the 8/16 ANSI colors. Which makes translucent TUI windows not work. :(

The first method is through downloading the pre-built binaries. With this method, you don't need to install anything other than Nushell's dependencies. Once you've downloaded the binaries, add them to your system's environment path to run it directly in your terminal.

I rather nushell for this purpose, it's more fun to write and easier to read.

https://www.nushell.sh/

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-...