Cicada – Unix shell written in Rust

Amazing work! Between this, Alacritty [1], and coreutils [2], we&#x27;re getting pretty close to a plausible all-Rust CLI stack.<p>While Cicada is pretty clearly modeled on the &quot;old&quot; generation of shells (sh, Bash, Zsh, etc.), one has to wonder what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`), and terribly obscure syntax.<p>PowerShell seems to have been a flop outside of the Windows ecosystem, and between overly elaborate syntax and COM baggage, was probably rightfully passed over, but it probably had the right idea. Imagine a future where we&#x27;re piping structured objects between programs, scripting in a modern language, and have IntelliSense quality auto-completion for every command.<p>---<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jwilm&#x2F;alacritty" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jwilm&#x2F;alacritty</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uutils&#x2F;coreutils" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uutils&#x2F;coreutils</a>

There&#x27;s also this project:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;redox-os&#x2F;ion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;redox-os&#x2F;ion</a><p>It&#x27;s intially build with RedoxOS (in Rust as well) underneath, but now also runs on Linux. Seems to be a bit more mature.<p>I wonder what sets these two projects apart, and&#x2F;or if the devs of Casada know of Ion&#x27;s existence.

Apologies for the off-topic nature of this, but:<p>Something that&#x27;s been capturing my imagination recently is sshing into a machine, pushing an appropriate shell binary to &#x2F;tmp, and then executing it. If you have an exotic preference for shell (or vim config, or whatever), we&#x27;ve presumably generally got sufficient bandwidth these days to do a virtually instant user-space install and execution, no?

Looks fully featured! Cool stuff.<p>I think people are going to ask &quot;Why?&quot; and &quot;What&#x27;s the difference between this and bash?&quot; Might want to cover that in your README.

Escaping and passing strings as arguments (without losing e.g. &quot; characters) is often a problem. It would be so nice if this would be solved in a shell the way it works for function calls in propper programming languages like Python or Rust (i.e. various ways to specify strings with special characters and a good format method for string composition) with Haskell-like function call syntax.

&quot; Won&#x27;t do list * functions * Windows support &quot;<p>&#x2F;cry

<i>Note: Rust environment is needed for installation.</i><p>Why?

Oh, bummer, I was really hoping it would support Windows.

Being able to do arithmetic right in the shell is handy.

I just have to say, while I respect the work and have been looking forward to nix tools being ported to rust, the first thing I do is see if it&#x27;s GPL or not and if it&#x27;s not it immediately loses points (not all of them), because I have been working hard to free up my stacks. I wish people would consider making core system tools like this GPL instead of MIT&#x2F;BSD styles. Tivoization is a real threat to the freedom of users and devs. (which is what mit license enables, despite it being listed as &quot;gpl compat&quot;)<p>For example, I forced myself to learn screen really well because even though I like tmux and it has some features lacking in screen, I would rather support a tool I know is more aligned with freedom for the user. Same with i3 vs awesome, etc.<p>An interesting side benefit of this is I have noticed the complexity of my stack has been reduced because of this selectiveness.