Feature suggestion: include shelljs about zx

[antonmedv]

Interesting idea. I like it. Let me think about it for some time. 🙃

[kapouer]

Note that adding more dependencies makes the tool less simple to maintain and distribute,
which is a nice thing to keep in mind if "xz" is meant to be some kind of "shell" alternative.
I have debian in mind of course - where the situation is actually pretty good, only "shq" needs to be packaged,
and "shelljs" has already all its dependencies packaged (maybe more work is required for the tests suites).

[rattrayalex]

I think shelljs seems to be implemented in pure JS (for example, echo is basically process.stdout.write) so it's portable across platforms.

I would hope that adding a library like it would be very simple to maintain; just something like this:

import shell from 'shelljs';

const {sed, cp, ls, rm, which, /*etc*/} = shell;
export {
  shell,
  
  sed,
  cp,
  ls,
  rm,
  which,
  /*etc*/
}

I do predict some slightly tricky questions around whether to use shelljs's implementation of cd or keep the current one, and of course you'd have to document that you need to use shell.exec() to access that functionality instead of just exec() (since it'd conflict with the evil builtin function). There may be other conflicts or difficulties I'm not thinking of.

If shelljs were included, it might also be worth considering using it under the hood for $`cmd`, since it returns the nice ShellString response with .code, .stdout, .stderr, but that would not need to happen right away by any means.

Worth noting that shelljs is 211kb unpackaged according to npm (probably fine for the use-case, but much larger than zxs current 24kb) and gets almost 7mm downloads/wk, indicating it's very widely used for this purpose.

[antonmedv]

Including shelljs isn't planned for zx.
It can be easily done on user side:

require('shelljs/global');