Reviewing YSH
www.oilshell.org

YSH, or the shell formally known as oil, is touted as a possible upgrade path from Bash.

This is the first in a three-part series of posts re-introducing the language.

  1. Reviewing YSH (you are here)
  2. Sketches of YSH Features
  3. YSH, Narrow Waists, and Perlis-Thompson Problems (Not yet released)
  • GammaOPMEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I need to disclaim that I am not affiliated with the project, and have actually been pretty critical of it in the past. But I tend to agree with the author’s reasoning across most of the blog, so I believe there is real merit to the shell.

    Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll all be writing YSH!

    • Howard DoEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      At what is this better than zsh, bash or fish? What make u switch to ysh?

      • GammaOPMEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I haven’t switched to ysh. I personally use Zsh for my interactive shell, but I write my scripts in a variety of shells.

        You can start with Ysh in its Bash-compatible mode, individually enable new features with shopt. Those features include:

        • Not splitting or globbing $foo by default (this is shared by Zsh and Fish)
        • A Python-inpsired parsing mode, which should supersede arithmetic mode (induced by ( ) in tests, $[ ] for string splicing and @[ ] for array splicing)
        • Strucutred data
        • New functions which return structured data (Oil calls classic shell functions “procs”, because they behave a lot like external programs with extra side effects)
        • cd to/somewhere { echo $PWD;}