Rush: the ruby shell

https://github.com/Spakman/urchin/

I really like a lot about existing shells like Bash and Zsh, so it operates much like a standard shell - pipelines, job control, redirections, tilde expansion, aliasing, globbing, etc.

However, actual shell scripting feels really grim, so sometime in the near future (hopefully) it will be able to pipe into Ruby when needed. This will let you write Ruby directly on the command line, without escaping quotes and such and should make loops and custom shell functions much more fun for a Ruby programmer.

I also fancy experimenting with some things I've not seen in other shells - fuzzy filepath completion, per-project history, etc.

Any ideas are welcome!

Certain things are definitely annoying to do with just the standard set of UNIX tools, but not knowing them well certainly won't help.

Here is how you go about it, for those interested:

http://ipython.scipy.org/doc/stable/html/interactive/shell.h... http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/02/07/python-for-bash-script...

Seems like, Rush is the ruby counterpart of what IPython is in python.

I know there was a RubyOS once, where they were trying to use Ruby in place of the shell.

The ability to easily execute commands on several remote servers is really appealing. At work, I only need to be able to ssh to 5 different servers and I frequently don't have a free screen terminal.

Firstly, this will never have the adoption of bash, sit down on any Linux and you will be familiar. If you get used to shell and a normal human being which will have some delay context switching it will be a performance hit (same argument I'm sticking with qwerty for now)

Secondly, bash uses a domain specific language to tangle your fillesystem, simple things are simple, and unfortunately harder things Gerald blinked in the process. This comes with the overhead of learning some unintuitive things about ruby (blocks anyone?).

> bash and ssh, we love you, but your era is past.

I'd love for that to be true, but let's see how their first example does compare against bash/ssh:

    local = Rush::Box.new('localhost')
    remote = Rush::Box.new('my.remote.server.com')
    local_dir = local['/Users/adam/myproj/']
    remote_dir = remote['/home/myproj/app/']
    
    local_dir.copy_to remote_dir
    remote_dir['**/.svn/'].each { |d| d.destroy }

    remote=my.remote.server.com
    local_dir=/Users/adam/myproj/
    remote_dir=/home/myproj/app

    scp -r $local_dir $remote:$remote_dir
    ssh $remote "find $remote_dir -name .svn | xargs rm"

Contrary to bash reputation, there is a lot less hard to type line noisy characters in the bash/ssh version than in the rush one, namely all the |[{ etc of the ruby version.

In my opinion, due to the reduced line noise, the bash/ssh version is a lot easier to read too. But it's less self-explanatory, in that scp/ssh commands are replaced by full names.

One might argue that the rush version is more conceptually elegant, because everything is objects, and you can streamline treatments this way, but :

- Even if this isn't true for bash, in practice it's the same thing, because connection strings are treated like hosts by all relevant programs, directory strings like directories by all relevant programs, etc. You lose in typing but not in usability

- This is in a context of a script where the authors considered it was better to actually have variables for everything, so that, i guess, the thing be better configurable, readable, and reusable. That's a good goal, but it's not always necessary.

Let's see how "raw" versions of the two compare :

    scp -r /Users/adam/myproj/ my.remote.server.com:/home/myproj/app
    ssh my.remote.server.com "find /home/myproj/app/ -name .svn | xargs rm"

    root['/Users/adam/myproj/'].copy_to Rush::Box.new('my.remote.server.com')['/home/myproj/app/']
    Rush::Box.new('my.remote.server.com')['/home/myproj/app/**/.svn/'].each { |d| d.destroy }

So i seriously doubt something like rush can replace something like bash/ssh. The benefits are likely to show up for bigger operations, where lots of people already use perl/python/ruby anyway because bash is a PITA for any serious programming, but bash still seems a lot more usable as a "shell", and i kind of understood this was the purpose of this.