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)
  • Howard DoEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

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

    • GammaOPMEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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;}