tab-rs VS dhall-lang

If you want to read some code, my project is tab-rs.

I myself use the many (alacritty) terminals + tiling WM solution at the moment (switching between i3wm and LeftWM) but it doesn't feel optimal. I always though tmux looked too involved to learn so I've been on the lookout for alternatives such as Wezterm (a terminal with built-in multiplexing), tab (a command line controlled multiplexer) and now zellij.

Plus a lot of cleanup in the tab-pty-process crate. It now exposes an interface similar to portable-pty, but with non-blocking file handles.

I ended up writing a terminal multiplexer because screen and tmux were too complicated to use. It has a built in fuzzy finder, stateless navigation, and YAML configs for persistent sessions: https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs/

The way I typically unify messages is define an enum, and map/merge channel receivers. tokio-stream would probably work with these examples. Here's an example from a fuzzy-finder implementation: https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs/blob/main/tab-command/src/service/terminal/fuzzy.rs#L332

Really nice cheat-sheet write up on screen & tmux & byobu.

Also worth checking out tabs-rs[1] which seems very well reviewed & recent.

Personally, I am a huge fan of dtach[2][3], which isn't a multiplexer, just a detachable proxier of terminal sessions. This let's me run a persistent vim session that I can reconnect to, and vim has however many terminals I need open in it. Vim does my multiplexing, dtach just allows me to make vim persistent. Very glad to have re-discovered dtach, to enable this workflow.

Notably dtach is very lightweight. Unlike tmux, it is not a virtual terminal. Upon reconnect to my vim session, I issue a control-l to refresh the screen. Dtach hasn't retained the screen state, isn't translating between terminfos. The one thing that can go wrong here is connecting from different terminals- few programs have a way to update the TERM setting once the program has launched.

[1] https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs

[2] https://github.com/crigler/dtach

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dtach

The nice thing about that is that many other tools can work too. Someone using direnv can set properties that would be available in the hurl script. Likewise, someone using tab could have environment variables defined for their active tab that could be used. If you invent your own notion of an environment, you lose interop with a lot of other tools that target the standard environment.

Are you running v0.5.3? I just released a fix for a Kakoune issue that was caused by add-highlighter global/ number-lines -relative in kakrc. It sounds similar to what you described.

There are also some crazy ANSI sequences that cause the terminal emulator to write stdin - so applications can query the terminal state. Crazy stuff can happen when those sequences are copied from the scrollback buffer (which is why tab now filters them out).

Fail to see how this is any different than Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) other than it produces plists too.

Kubernetes config is a decent example. I had ChatGPT generate a representative silly example -- the content doesn't matter so much as the structure:

https://gist.github.com/cstrahan/528b00cd5c3a22e3d8f057bb1a7...

Now consider 100s (if not 1000s) of such files.

I haven't given Pkl an in depth look yet, but I can say that the Industry Standard™ of "simple YAML" + string substitution (with delicate, error prone indentation -- since YAML is indentation sensitive) is easily beat by any of:

- https://jsonnet.org/

- https://nickel-lang.org/

- https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html

- https://dhall-lang.org/

- (insert many more here, probably including Pkl)

There are underpowered languages / tools, that can only solve a problem for which they are intended poorly. But not all limited tools are like that.

Say, eBPF is prominently not Turing-complete, which allows to guarantee that a eBPF program terminates, and even how soon. Still eBPF is hugely useful in its area.

Or, say, regular expressions are limited to regular languages; in particular, they famously [1] cannot process recursive structures, like trees. Still tools like grep / ag / rg are mightily useful.

Yes, I agree that YAML is underpowered for proper k8s configuration! But it's also too powerful for its own good in other aspects [2]. I wish Google used Dhall [3] or their own purely functional config language (FCL? I already forgot the name) instead of YAML; sadly, they did not.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/223424

[2]: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr...

[3]: https://dhall-lang.org/

Dhall: Dhall is a programmable configuration language that combines features like JSON, functions, types, and import capabilities. Its style leans towards functional programming, so if you're familiar with functional-style languages such as Haskell, you might find Dhall to be quite intuitive.

I've been thinking along these lines but more 'strongly validated' than statically typed in the sense that you'd be better off being able to load the entire config and then produce a list of problems (and should be able to offer good editor support if done correctly).

Though https://dhall-lang.org/ demonstrates that you can statically type quite a lot of configuration to great advantage, which appears to be programmatically embeddable in multiple languages per https://docs.dhall-lang.org/howtos/How-to-integrate-Dhall.ht...

> Where practical is in the sense of an engineer (or in their terms, a CS practitioner),

Configuration processing. E.g. I'd like my yamls to be decidable, though I'd settle for guaranteed to halt[1].

[1] https://dhall-lang.org/

Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/

I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).

Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/

A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet

And to checkout Dhall: https://dhall-lang.org/