happy-ferret / oh

A surprisingly powerful Unix shell

A surprisingly powerful Unix shell

Oh is a Unix shell. If you've used other Unix shells, oh should feel familiar.

Where oh diverges from traditional Unix shells is in its programming language features.

At its core, oh is a heavily modified dialect of the Scheme programming language, complete with first-class continuations and proper tail recursion. Like early Scheme implementations, oh exposes environments as first-class values. Oh extends environments to allow both public and private members and uses these extended first-class environments as the basis for its prototype-based object system.

Written in Go, oh is also a concurrent programming language. It exposes channels, in addition to pipes, as first-class values. As oh uses the same syntax for code and data, channels and pipes can, in many cases, be used interchangeably. This homoiconic nature also allows oh to support fexprs which, in turn, allow oh to be easily extended. In fact, much of oh is written in oh.¹

For a detailed comparison to other Unix shells see: Comparing oh to other Unix Shells

Installing

With Go 1.5 or greater installed,

go get github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh

According to gox, oh compiles on the following platforms:

darwin/386
darwin/amd64
dragonfly/amd64
freebsd/386
freebsd/amd64
freebsd/arm
linux/386
linux/amd64
linux/arm
linux/arm64
linux/ppc64
linux/ppc64le
netbsd/386
netbsd/amd64
netbsd/arm
openbsd/386
openbsd/amd64
plan9/386
plan9/amd64
solaris/amd64
windows/386
windows/amd64

(Oh compiles and runs on Plan 9 and Windows but should be considered experimental on those plarforms. On Solaris, interactive features are limited).

Using

For more detail see: Using oh

License

MIT

1. ^ Currently, 439 of 6858 lines of code are written in oh with an additional 934 lines of Go generated by 175 lines of oh.