readline VS shelljs

... I kind of am, though. Which is why I didn't know what to do. I don't see a lot of free open source projects with extensive documentation in their README. Some, yes, but for example here's the readline library I'm using. I, in my well-meaning ignorance, supplied 50 pages of documentation and people are behaving like I ate a baby 'cos it's in the wrong format. I will now put it all in the README as people would like, but I did genuinely act out of ignorance and not out of a wish to insult the customs of the tribe.

> I would like to see a framework for creating rich REPLs that would be language agnostic, so that I could get a state of the art auto-completion dialog no matter which language I decided to make into a shell.

It's doable with existing tools. You have LSP to provide the syntactical framework and there's no shortage of alternatives to readline (I'd written my own[1] to use in murex[2], and open sourced that).

[1] https://github.com/lmorg/readline

[2] https://murex.rocks

The problem you still face is that a good shell will offer autocompletion suggestions for strings that aren't language keywords or function names. eg

- file names; and there's a lot of hidden logic in how to do this. Do you build in fzf-like support, just include fzf wholesale but increase your dependency tree, or go for basic path completion. Do you check metadata (eg hidden files and system files on Windows), include dot-prefixed files on Linux / UNIX, etc. How do you know when to return paths, or paths and files, or even know not to return disk items at all? (see next point)

- flags for existing CLI tools (assuming you want compatibility with existing tools). Fish and murex will parse man pages to populate suggestions, others rely entirely on the community to write autocompletion scripts.

- Are you including variables in your completion of strings. And if so are you reading the variables to spot if it's a path and then following that path. eg `cd $HOME/[tab]` should then return items inside a your home directory even though you've not actually specified your home directory as a string. That means the shell needs to expand the variables to see if it's a valid path. But that's a shell decision rather than a language feature.

Some of these lists might take a while to populate so you then have another problem. Do you delay the autocompletion list (bad UX because it slows the user down) or provide the autocompletion sooner. And if the latter, how do you do that without:

1. changing the items under what you're about to select causing you to accidentally select the wrong option

2. communicate that there are update clearly

3. ensure the UI is consistent when slower loading entries might not fit the same dimensions as the space allocated for the list (if you dynamically size your completions to fit the screen real estate)

4. ensure that there's still something present while you're lazy loading the rest of the suggestions; and that those early entries on the completion list are worthwhile and accurate

5. what about sorting the list? Alphabetical? By feature? etc

The REPL in murex was inspired by IDEs so I've spent a lot of time trying to consider how to provide the best UX around autocompletion. One thing I've learnt is that it's a lot harder to get right than it seems on the surface.

When I need shell-like utilities from my JS scripts I've previously used shelljs [0]. It's neat that Bun is adding more built-in utilities though.

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

Now we can open this new project and we're going to install one package, shelljs Shelljs is a great Command Line Utility for interacting with the command line in JavaScript.

Feels like this library is trying to solve a problem solved long ago by shelljs

The purpose of OP's project kind of reminded me of shell.js (shx) [1] which is a nodejs library that wraps all kinds of common UNIX commands to their own synchronously executed methods.

I guess that most shell projects start off as wanting to be a cross-platform solution to other operating systems, but somewhere in between either escalate to being their own programming language (like all the powershell revamps) or trying to reinvent the backwards-compatibility approach and/or POSIX standards (e.g. oil shell).

What I miss among all these new shell projects is a common standardization effort like sh/dash/bash/etc did back in the days. Without creating something like POSIX that also works on Windows and MacOS, all these shell efforts remain being only toy projects of developers without the possibility that they could actually replace the native shells of Linux distributions.

Most projects in the node.js area I've seen migrate their build scripts at some point to node.js, because maintaining packages and runtimes on Windows is a major shitshow. node.js has the benefit (compared to other environments) that it's a single .exe that you have to copy somewhere and then you're set to go.

When I compare that with python, for example, it is super hard to integrate. All the anaconda- or python-based bundles for ML engineers are pretty messed up environments on Windows; and nobody actually knows where their site-packages/libraries are really coming from and how to even update them correctly with upstream.

[1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

`` When I then run this file with./bin/nodefile`, it exits, but the working directory of the current shell context has not changed. I have also tried shelljs, but that does not work either.

Oh people have tried - here are a few https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10239235/are-there-any-l...

I vaguely remember quite liking bish when I saw it years ago https://github.com/tdenniston/bish but it looks like no commits in 6 years.

This shelljs thing looks more promising, but really tedious to use https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs - shell.rm('-rf', 'out/Release'); I'd rather suffer proper bash than have to do that sort of thing.

Nothing seems to have really caught on so far. Bash is easy to learn and hack on, and before you know it, that simple install.sh that started out moving a few files around is 5000 lines, unmaintainable, and critical to bootstrapping your software :)

I personally prefer shelljs for stuff like this. zx seems pretty high on the "insane syntactic sugar" train.

As we are creating starter files, let's use ShellJS to run commands like git clone, mkdir...

This talks a bunch about the "good run" of current scripting languages, including for example JavaScript.

But JavaScript, as an actual scripting language, has been pretty primitive but finally starting to become a real candidate for actual scripting. There's imo crufty not very great options like shelljs[1]. But adding a tagged-template string for system(), for calling things, and a little bit of standard library has made JS a much more interesting & competent scripting language. Those efforts are being done in ZX[2].

I like the idea of the topic, exploring it. But the author feels off in a number of places.

> What TypeScript showed is that you could join together the idea of a flexible lightweight (and optional!) type system onto an existing programming language, and do so successfully. . . .The question then is - what if you created a programming language from the start to have this kind of support?

Personally I just don't think languages matter very much. They're very similar, by & large. They have different tooling, packaging, somewhat different looks/feels for executing code, and their standard libraries are different. But TypeScript is popular & fast at least 90% because it is JS, because it works with JS things. Arguing that we should try to recreate TypeScript apart from JS sounds like a mind blowing waste of time. Also, Deno has good integrated TypeScript support.

On the topic of easy parallelism, JavaScript promises are imo quite easy to stitch together & use & quite available.

One of the main issues I see with easy-parallelism is that it's too easy: there's too many cases for uncontrolled parallelism. Throwing tarn.js or other worker-pools at problems seems all too common. But one is still left stitching together each pool/stage of work. I'd like to see SEDA[3] like architectures emerge, and perhaps get added to something like ZX standard library.

[1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

[2] https://github.com/google/zx

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_architectu...