mattmunz / mshell

A humane shell

MShell

A humane shell.

Overview

Mshell is a general purpose interactive shell. (Mshell is a provisional name.)

The primary motivation for this shell is that while text UIs are helpful, shell programming can be a pain. Wouldn't it be nice to have a higher-level (typed) language to use when working with the shell? An additional motivation is that many text UIs are arcane. Let's explore the development of a truly humane text UI.

Release Notes

7/28/16 Some simple commands are supported, based on Spring Shell.

Status

There's not much here yet. More designs and commands are needed...

User guide

TODO Implement the user guide.

Design

Started initially as just a collection of scripts and shell function, and now growing into a Java program, potentially having a daemon component and also potentially having a lightweight native front end.

V1 Domain model

Command group

• Name -- globally unique

Command

• Name -- globally unique
• execute(Arguments)
• HelpContent

CommandRegistry

• Commands

Interpreter -- Takes a string of text and executes commands accordingly

CLI -- UI for interpreter

V2 Design using Spring Shell

Modules

Core -- Uses spring-shell to boot a basic shell

Extensions -- Includes commands from unpublished stuff including Jot, NextToDo, Babe (build/clean), and Scripting (mp)

Some shell scripts are divided between these two modules too. Over time, the extensions will be published...

TODO

Add a general means for running background tasks. Should have a nice UI and allow task authors to write single-threaded tasks that can be invoked in the background, perhaps with a command siilar to foo & in bash. Add simple calculator functions, perhaps also integrate another shell like R -- This could make that doable: https://rforge.net/JRI/ Provide better deployment instructions. All documentation should be made available online in the application(s). Publish more extensions (see Design for details) ...

Contact

Please contact Matt Munz if you have any difficulty or to provide feedback (which would be very welcome).

Author

Matt Munz