oursh VS busybox-w32

There is also https://github.com/nixpulvis/oursh which wants to be POSIX compatible with its own extensions. Actually I would prefer if a new shell focuses on bash compatibility.

If features are integrated, then I would probably want to have something about error handling because it is difficult to get right in bash even with shellcheck¹ and gets just worse when things run in parallel.

¹ https://www.shellcheck.net/

A lot of this has to do with the integration between the Terminal and the Shell. A project that came up recently that seems to take on a few of the issues is https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works. I've been meaning to write up a proper critique of this project at some point, but I keep getting side-tracked.

I also want a replacement for `fish`, however it's a pretty tall order to implement what I have in mind, and I got a bit stuck trying to find the right abstractions for background job management in Rust (there's a lot going on). But I genuinely believe a multi-language shell with POSIX support will finally allow us to move forward in the terminal environment. UI/UX issues like ctrl-c, window management, and everything else can be implemented as derivations from POSIX, or additions.

While somewhat tangential to the main thread of this post, I'll still leave my (incomplete) shell here for anyone who's interested. https://github.com/nixpulvis/oursh. The README has a decent description of features I want off the bat, and there's a bunch of design level issues in the tracker.

I'll never accept the death of the Terminal environment.

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.