Proposal for a new tag shell meant for shells and possibly command line tricks. This would cover zsh, bash, shell completion, in development shells, and anything else that pops up.
Sample posts:
- https://lobste.rs/s/ad3apl/osh_oil_shell_0_6_pre16_now_available_aur
- https://lobste.rs/s/6hlx5f/intro_zsh_utils
- https://lobste.rs/s/8czxmg/fsh_shell_with_integrated_f_scripting
- https://lobste.rs/s/bbitsd/ghost_shell_part_4
- https://lobste.rs/s/nabcv0/what_are_your_experiences_with_unix_based
- https://lobste.rs/s/csrg5q/shell_from_scratch_by_gary_bernhardt
There are many more as well. This was just a quick sampling I found from recent memory and search.
I dont like “tooling”
i think “shell” is the best option - “shell” can include the shell itself “sh”, etc - and all shell tools - “grep” “sed” “awk” etc - “shell” is the name used here:
I think “shell” for actual shells, and “cli” for using a command line interface (grep, sed, awk, etc.)
If you’re composing shell tools using shell features, that surely counts as ‘shell’ in the sense of ‘shell scripting’. right?
CLI is too general, seeing as how it covers all REPLs, and too specific, seeing as how it doesn’t cover shell scripts (unless those scripts implement or incorporate a REPL).
Would you also categorize command-line tooling under this tag, or just the actual shells?
I was also thinking of tooling - hence the zsh-utils example. Similar to a programming language tag - updates for the language and anything written in that language could fall under the tag. This would also avoid separate tags for bash, zsh, posix shell etc, because of how similar they are overall.
It might be worth is just to have a
toolingtag.I could make a much better case for that, though the concern is that it’d become a dumping ground for product advertising.
I think the name tooling might be too broad for what I was imagining. Since you could easily make the case that something like docker should be included under tooling because it’s dev tooling.
It’s also a bit farther from my interest in shell scripting, which is a big part of the reason for my tag proposal.
a) and [terminal] [console] or course [tty] and keyboard
b) gnome are the shell? gnome can run programs, have script language, and is for user?
a. I’m not sure… my original idea behind shell was more shell scripting focused. Adding all those would be a bit too granular, at least IMO.
b. gnome-shell isn’t a shell in the normal programming use of the word. It’s the core of a desktop environment. It uses javascript as the scripting language, so there’s already a tag for that.
So what would the unix tag be used for?
Linux/BSD/OS things? I’m not entirely sure what to use it for now…
Articles about… UNIX! :)
Articles about kernels, UNIX userspaces, process management, containerization/virtualization, variants, history, etc etc.
It would be odd to me for UNIX concepts to co-opt a ’‘shell’’ tag. Are Window’s Powershell or DOS’s various shells no longer ’‘true shells’’? There are also the shells from Multics, VMS, Genera, Oberon, and many others.
If you want to mean only UNIX shells, then what’s wrong with the UNIX tag that already exists?
My struggle with
unixis that I’m not entirely sure it’s the right place for projects like prezto, oh-my-zsh, and zsh-utils… as well as more in depth shell scripting. I see your point… maybe “shell” isn’t the right tag, but it seems like a decent option and I don’t have any other alternatives.‘windows’ + ‘cli’ vs ‘unix’ + ‘cli’ is a sufficient distinction isn’t it?
Yeah, I suppose that does make sense
Why isn’t “programming” sufficient for shell related things? Not saying there shouldn’t be a “shell” tag but shell related things are technically also programming related things so why draw the distinction?
There are programming language tags for tons of other languages - elm, c, clojure, go, and rust just to name a few. I’d argue that there should also be one for shell scripting?
But then there are variations of shells as well, e.g. powershell, zsh, fish, etc. A consistent fine grained classification is fine but that’s not the case for programming languages so I don’t think there is reason to delineate shell as a special category.
So at first I liked this idea, then reading the comments made me realize why I don’t think this tag would work the way the original author intended.
In order for the ‘shell’ tag to actually make sense, the tag would need to have ONLY truly shell articles - e.g. bash, oil, zsh etc associated with it. That’s a pretty narrow scoped audience. I’d argue that some combination of ‘devops’ or ‘unix’ would serve just as well.
(Yes I know using ‘devops’ like this is not precisely in the spirit of what Devops originally meant and embraces incorrect wide industry usage, but I’ve also given up on the mainstream’s use of the word ‘hacker’ so call me a dirty descrpitive-ist where words are concerned :)
To be honest, I’ve been thinking the same thing. There’s not a good consensus on this… I’d still like a way to tag shell articles, but I can live with
unixfor now.Would “TUI” tools like fzf or mc also fall into it? This feels very unclear to me.