Getting Started

Es: A shell with higher-order functions

In the fall of 1990, one of us (Rakitzis) re-implemented the Plan 9 command interpreter, rc, for use as a UNIX shell. Experience with that shell led us to wonder whether a more general approach to the design of shells was possible, and this paper describes the result of that experimentation. We applied concepts from modern functional programming languages, such as Scheme and ML, to shells, which typically are more concerned with UNIX features than language design. Our shell is both simple and highly programmable. By exposing many of the internals and adopting constructs from functional programming languages, we have created a shell which supports new paradigms for programmers.

About the book | A guide to a-Shell

a-Shell is not only a terminal emulator for iOS/iPadOS, but also an environment with a set of useful libraries, where you can run basic Unix commands and other tricky tools.

Home | Oh My Posh

The most customizable and fastest prompt engine for any shell.

Forking is Cool, or: A Unix Shell in Zig, or: Dave Learns How to Fork - ratfactor

In this article, I make a real, working interactive shell written in Zig. Though essentially a toy, it demonstrates the incredible elegance of the fork() system call and is an example of what can be done with absolutely no runtime memory allocations.

Omnix

Omnix aims to supplement the Nix CLI to improve developer experience. The project is developed on Github.

ui.sh — Turn your terminal into a design engineer

A toolkit for coding assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex to help you build UIs that don't suck.

Terminal UI the Easy Way: BubbleTEA

For the past 18 months I've been tinkering with a terminal application that serves as an Algorand node frontend. I had a number of requireme...

Command Line Interface Guidelines

An open-source guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day.

Atuin - Shell History & Executable Runbooks

We started with an open-source CLI that developers actually wanted to use. Now we're exploring what happens when that same philosophy meets team workflows.

google/zx

A tool for writing better scripts

Mosh: the mobile shell

Mobile shell that supports roaming and intelligent local echo. Like SSH secure shell, but allows mobility and more responsive and robust.

the world hasn’t figured out yet that you can literally just fix everything with a Nix overlay

There are many things that are uncertain in our industry right now, but one thing I am certain about, and have been for almost 13 years, is that Nix is a terrible programming language. I remember when I first learned it, it felt like pushing shit uphill. The learning cliff

The Terminal • furbo.org

I’ve been using the Unix command line since 1983 and like most software developers, the Terminal app is a permanent fixture in my Dock. Over the years I’ve learned a lot of things that make working in this environment more productive, but even old dogs like me are constantly learning new tricks. As much as […]