Powerlisp: Common Lisp tool for automating tasks for Unix power-users | Hacker News Reader

Powerlisp: Common Lisp tool for automating tasks for Unix power-users

github.com

145 points_emacsomancer_33 comments

I read the whole README and I still have no idea what this does. Something about bookmarking websites and searches in some sort of configurable menu?

I read the source (it isn’t that long), it seems you can bookmark an arbitrary Unix command in a configurable menu. Kinda neat, don’t see myself using this however.

Hello, I'm the author. I just found out someone put this in HN again, I hope I can explain.

This is basically a way to create menus and submenus for recurrent utilities. You can use a rofi or dmenu frontend. Once you bind it a key shortcut, rofi/dmenu will come up asking you what to do.

Right now I can directly access my favorite websites, open my favorite programs, do web search (and also switch web engine), all without touching the browser directly. The idea is to group a lot of things in a lightweight script, and have a keyboard-only interaction with no extra extensions or programs.

I agree that the README is a little poor right now, and screenshots/gifs would also help on this regard. I'll start working on it pretty soon.

Maybe "rofi/dmenu scripting and configuration layer written in Common Lisp" might be an appropriate tagline?

Right. With the current title my first impression was that it was like a Unix shell with Common Lisp somehow as the shell language. I mean the shell is the tool Unix power-users mostly use to automate tasks.

It might be a good idea to add screenshots or a gif or something to the README, and I see they've realized that.

Awesome! Nice work.

Hm, I have similar project, but for OSX users:

https://github.com/40ants/cl-bitbar

It is a library to write plugins for https://getbitbar.com

I like this idea as the foundation of a Lisp-based shell. I'd like to see an plugin API, and package mechanism, similar to MELPA for Emacs. Users could write scripts and publish them as a signed package, then users could install them.

I'd also love to see terminal Emacs as the default shell editor for this shell.

Racket has Rash for this sort of thing

https://docs.racket-lang.org/rash/index.html

“Lisp-based shell” is so overdone. The hot new thing is merging Common Lisp and POSIX shell into a single, monstrous language!

https://github.com/bradleyjensen/shcl

FWIW I have a list of similar ideas done in essentially every language, including every popular Lisp variant:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources#inter...

That’s really cool! I got more than a few new ideas for SHCL by browsing through that list. Thanks for sharing!

> I like this idea as the foundation of a Lisp-based shell.

I thought that was called emacs...{ducks}

/...though seriously...

eshell: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.h...

It isn't lisp but I have used xonsh which is a python shell. It has a lot of nice uses and it is much easier to right python that can interact with normal shell commands well including capturing their outputs than is to write actual bash or whatever scripts. And being able to create these things in a solid repl is very nice.

In general I have dreamed for ages of one language could enough to do everything I want to do with a computer. And I am pretty imaginative as to what is in that set.

There’s already a PowerLisp, it’s the original version of Corman Lisp for Macintosh.

This sounds really interesting to me, I have a bunch of items I can think of where this might be useful to automate (for example, my wife and I have different bank accounts, but share a credit card for points reasons... givng my wife a statement is really hard since they "upgraded" their site, and removed the transactions export feature).

But I'm not sure where to start automating this. It would be great to have some examples.

In that case, you might want to check the wiki. There are still some examples missing, but they'll give you a general idea.

Another nice tool (written in Haskell rather than Lisp in this case) is Greenclip, which integrates a clipboard into rodi/dmenu: https://github.com/erebe/greenclip

Any examples of it in use?

Looks like it's time to create a Guix for BSD systems.

I really would like to see this in future, especially for OpenBSD

Which operating systems are supported? Don't see that in the Readme.

Hello. It was tested on Linux and FreeBSD. Works fine on any of those systems if you have SBCL and dmenu installed, though it might need a few tweaks on program paths of your configuration file.

I plan to migrate this to a more flexible Roswell script in a near future.

Like OSX' automator?

Workflow languages are in vogue this morning, huh?

I know that Lisp is very popular here on HN (Paul Graham!), but my gut feeling tells me that many Lisp related posts with hardly any upvotes / comments get pushed to the front page of HN. I wish there was a HN filter to hide certain keywords.

NB: I read SICP cover to cover twenty years ago, did many private projects with DrScheme (Racket) and was influenced by it's paradigms early on. I do appreciate Lispy topics, but why front page of HN?

You can hide individual posts, which I find useful for a lot of non-technical content that's less interesting to me. It's manual, but it gets them off the home page and you can see content from the 2nd/3rd pages of material that may be of more interest to you.

Appreciate your help. - Actually that's what I do. Hide manually.

You can always use greasemonkey/tampermonkey extensions, the HN markup is pretty straightforward...

I think Common Lisp specifically is enjoying a bit of a spike in popularity (at least on HN, I've noticed a lot more front page stories over the last some years than previously) especially as more people realize it's out of the box way more powerful than what you find in SICP's Scheme. (A few offhand things one finds: type declarations with compile-time error checking in the most popular implementation + type info used to produced optimized assembly you can immediately inspect, non-braindead OOP, non-braindead error system, multi-million line software project existence proofs, long history of useful old code that still works like an inline arithmetic reader macro...)

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