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Oils Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to oils
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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zig
General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
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ohmyzsh
🙃 A delightful community-driven (with 2,400+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.
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RegExr
RegExr is a HTML/JS based tool for creating, testing, and learning about Regular Expressions.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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murex
A smarter shell and scripting environment with advanced features designed for usability, safety and productivity (eg smarter DevOps tooling)
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melody
Melody is a language that compiles to regular expressions and aims to be more readable and maintainable
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better oils alternative or higher similarity.
oils discussion
oils reviews and mentions
Posts with mentions or reviews of oils.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-06.
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Brush (Bo(u)rn(e) RUsty SHell) a POSIX and Bash-Compatible Shell in Rust
I am not sure if this helps or not, but if you want a bash-compatible shell, translating Oils to Ada or porting it to Windows could be easier than adding bash arrays.
It is extremely hairy, and it differs from bash version to version
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43910883
I mentioned in another comment that Koichi Murase, who is a bash contributor, and wrote the largest shell program in the world, just overhauled the bash array support in OSH
Relevant tests -- he added a huge number recently, and made them work:
https://oils.pub/release/0.29.0/test/spec.wwz/osh-py/array-s...
https://oils.pub/release/0.29.0/test/spec.wwz/osh-py/array-a...
https://oils.pub/release/0.29.0/test/spec.wwz/osh-py/ble-idi...
Our tests are thorough enough that we ROUTINELY find bugs in bash, like integer overflow bugs.
Koichi also knows about the differences between say bash 4.3, 4.4, 5.0, 5.1, etc. Because he has a very large program that uses bash arrays all over the place.
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Feel free to use our tests in any case (other shells like the Scheme shell used to bootstrap Guix have)
And feel free to post a message to https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils if you're interested or have questions
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Levels of Configuration Languages
Hm I also made a taxonomy of 5 categories of config languages, which is a bit different
Survey of Config Languages https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Survey-of-Config-...
Languages for String Data -
From Languages to Language Sets
- and we have built-in JSON, etc.
This is a hard design challenge, but I just made a release with an overhaul of Hay - https://oils.pub/release/0.28.0/
Hay version 1 was hard-coded in the interpreter - https://oils.pub/release/0.28.0/doc/hay.html
But we realized it's actually better to *self-host* it in YSH, using YSH reflection. We will be testing this by rewriting Hay in YSH
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So that's our language design response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43386115
> It's madness that languages are effectively siloed from each other.
Instead of tiers 4, 5, 6 being silo'd, we have them all under YSH and the Oils runtime (which is tiny, 2.3 MB of pure native code).
(As a bonus, OSH also runs on the Oils runtime, and it's the most bash-compatible shell!)
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[1] Garbage Collection Makes YSH Different - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/09/gc.html
Shell, Awk, and Make Should Be Combined - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/13.html - all these languages lack GC!
[2] Survey of Config Languages - https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Survey-of-Config-... - divides this category into 5 tiers:
1. Languages for String Data -
Tools for 2025
Looking at the original posting, the maintainer knows what the bug is. The stopper is more along the lines of "This looks synthetic, so it's not high priority. If it's a priority for you, then you should fix it yourself or make an argument for its priority." followed by oguz saying "It's not actually my problem either, I'm not invested in osh.". (not actual quotes: https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/issues/1881#issuecomme...)
The bug is that osh leaves the script fd open for the child process when executing a command, allowing the child command to mess with the parent script. I don't see this as a huge issue for everyday interactive use, but I'd prefer my shell to not do that. If I were executing programs with limited capabilities, I'd consider this a possible vector for security bugs. That is to say, I wouldn't use osh scrpts if I cared about security.
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Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
Congrats to the fish team! Great writeup with lots of interesting detail.
I wonder if this is the biggest project that has moved from C++ entirely to Rust (or maybe even C to Rust?) It probably has useful lessons for other projects.
If I'm reading this right, it looks like fish was not released as a hybrid C++ / Rust program, with the autocxx-generated bindings. There was a release during that time, but it says "fish 3.7 remains a C++ program" [1]
It sounds like they could have released if they wanted to, but there was a last stage of testing that didn't happen until the end.
Some people didn't quite get the motivation for adding C++ features to Rust [2], and vice versa, to enable inter-op. But perhaps this is a good case study. It would be nice if you could could just write new Rust code in a C++ codebase, without writing/generating bindings, and then throwing them away, which is mentioned in this post.
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Also the #1 gripe with Rust seems to be that it supports version detection, not feature detection.
But feature detection is better for distros, web browsers, and compilers:
https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Feature-Detection...
Version detection is why Chrome and IE pretend to be Mozilla, and why Clang pretends to be GCC. Feature detection doesn't cause this problem!
[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases
[2] e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=safecpp.org
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The Biggest Shell Programs in the World (Wiki)
If you have thousands of lines of bash, don't like maintaining it, but don't necessarily want to rewrite the whole thing at once, that's what https://www.oilshell.org/ is for!
See my comment here, with some details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42354095
(I created the project and the wiki page. Right now the best bet is to join https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ if it interests you. People who want to test it out should be comfortable with compiling source tarballs, which is generally trivial because shells have almost no dependencies. People are writing YSH from scratch and giving good feedback, but we can use feedback from people upgrading OSH to YSH )
The first step is:
shopt --set strict:all # at the top of the file -
The Shell Hater's Handbook
Might have been Oil shell, which is worth looking at: https://www.oilshell.org/
- What's New in POSIX 2024
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The Heart of Unix (2018)
I generally agree with this article in that PROGRAMMABILITY is the core of Unix, and it is why I've been working on https://www.oilshell.org/ for many years
However I think the counterpoint is maybe a weaker, programming analog of Doctorow's "Civil War on General Purpose Computing"
I believe the idea there was that we would all have iPads and iPhones, with content delivered to us, but we would not have the power to create our own content, or do arbitrary things with computers
I think that has largely come to pass
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The Unix/shell version of that is that important logic will be hidden in cloud services, in a YAML interface.
And your job is now to LLM the correct YAML
Not actually do any programming, which can lead to adjacent thoughts that the cloud/YAML owners didn't think of
In some ways there is an economic sense to this, but personally I don't want to live in that world :)
- Tour of Hell
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
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oils-for-unix/oils is an open source project licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 or later which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of oils is Python.
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