murex VS jc

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

This is exactly what Murex shell does. It has lots of builtin tools for querying structured data (of varying formats) but also supports POSIX pipes for using existing tools like `jq` et al seamlessly too.

https://murex.rocks

Stable is a problem because a lot of these shells don’t offer any guarantees for breaking changes.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

This is similar to how my shell works. It still just passes bytes around but additionally passes information about how those bytes could be interpreted. A schema if you will. So it works as cleanly with POSIX / GNU / et al tools as it does with fancy JSON, YAML, CSV and other document formats.

It basically sits somewhere between Powershell and Bash: typed pipelines like Powershell but without sacrificing familiarity with all the CLI commands you already use day in and day out.

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

As an aside, I’m about to drop a massive update in the next few days that will make the shell even more intuitive to use.

https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc - "CLI tool and python library that converts the output of popular command-line tools, file-types, and common strings to JSON, YAML, or Dictionaries. This allows piping of output to tools like jq and simplifying automation scripts."

> I'd love to see programs communicate through a typed JSON/proto format that shed enough details to make this more independent, and get useful shell command structuring/completion or full blown GUIs from simply introspecting the expected input and output types.

You should try PowerShell. It's basically Microsoft's .NET ecosystem molded into an interactive command line. I'm not entirely sure if PoweShell can make full use of the static types that build up its core, but its ability to exchange objects in the command line is almost unmatched.

On Linux you can use `jc` (https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc) combined with `jq` (https://jqlang.github.io/jq/) to glue together command lines.

In addition to my previous comment about jq-like tools, I want to share a couple other interesting tools, which I use alongside jq are jo [0] and jc [1].

[0]: https://github.com/jpmens/jo

[1]: https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc

> I wanted to write some wrappers for the standard commands that automatically did all this via `jq`.

If you're not already aware of it, you may wish to check out `jc`[0] which describes itself as a "CLI tool and python library that converts the output of popular command-line tools, file-types, and common strings to JSON, YAML, or Dictionaries. This allows piping of output to tools like jq..."

The `jc` documentation[1] & parser[2] for `ls` also demonstrates that reliable & cross-platform parsing of even "basic" commands can be non-trivial.

[0] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc

[1] https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/docs/parsers/ls

[2] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc/blob/4cd721be8595db52b6...