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Comment by ThemalSpan | Hacker News Reader

What would be the advantage over version controlled shell scripts?

(Not affiliated with Warp but care about this particular thing)

Shell scripts implies, well, a particular shell. If everyone is on similar OSes, maybe that works for you, but as a Windows user, "pile of bash scripts" might as well be "doesn't work for you." I use a terminal for my daily work, but don't have bash installed on my machine.

That said, I haven't tried Warp yet specifically because it's Mac-only right now. Even within that context, Warp integrates with Bash, Zsh, or Fish, which do have their own extensions to POSIX shell, but at least you can rely on Bash being installed.

That would also now force everyone to use this proprietary product instead of whatever they're familiar with.

For mac <-> linux, posix-compliant scripts mostly work in my experience but you have to account for different versions of gnu utils. For linux <-> windows, if it's small you could just write a powershell script, or use something like python on both, no?

I fail to see how these features are nice enough to force people to use a proprietary terminal that, for now, is compatible with existing bash/zsh shells.

Yes, that is true, but it does seem like that's what their strategy is. If you're using these collaboration tools at your job, you'd have to be using the product already. So that's less of a problem than it would be for say, scripts included with some sort of open source project.

My point is mostly that shell isn't cross-platform, and this is one way you could address that. But it's not a generalized solution, absolutely.

(and yeah, something like Python is better than trying to keep multiple of the same scripts in different languages, for sure. You can do it if you wanted though, if they're small and you're willing to commit to it, I'm not sure I've ever seen it really pulled off.)

>shell isn't cross-platform

basically every operating system has a posix shell by default except windows, but it has been ported there multiple times, samba existed for decades and WSL is on the rise. It may sound a little more irritating but they deserve it for still running windows :p /hj (besides you can just host an ssh server)

I mean, I could also tell you "Just download and run PowerShell, it's ported to Linux", but you also know that would make you feel like a second-class citizen, because you know it's not something as good as something that actually works on your platform in a real sense.

Why would it be easier to port Warp to a new system compared to Bash, Python, Perl, etc.? These tools are widely used to automate workflows and are already ported to any system you would probably care to develop on.

You aren't the one porting Warp, but you are the one porting the shell script.

So programs/workflows written in Warp will be portable without much effort, in some way that an equivalent shell or python script isn't? Why do you think that?

Thats a good question. In the end Warp programs/scripts will be written in just yet another interpreted language.

It seems like you’re grouping a bunch of things together and saying I have opinions about them that I don’t. Let’s break them out:

workflows I would assume to be portable, yes. It is an assumption. I generally expect program configuration to be mostly cross platform by default.

I’m not sure what a program written for a particular terminal would be, so I’m not sure if I’d assume portability or not.

Shells are not ubiquitous, even if they are available across platforms technically.

Python is truly cross platform and largely ubiquitous.

Ok, maybe I misunderstand what a "workflow" is. Since we are talking about replacing shell scripts with "workflows", I assumed that they are a kind of programming facility of about similar power as shell scripts. But that may be incorrect.

> You aren't the one porting Warp, but you are the one porting the shell script.

It sounds like your are saying somthing like "Warp scripts/workflows require almost no effort to port, compared to the shell scripts they replace". I was interested to learn how this can be the case. Perhaps my interpretation was wrong.

I may also be too; like I said, I haven't used Warp yet. Just read their docs. "Workflows" are described in their docs as effectively 'aliases with better docs that integrate with a search bar', and are defined in a YAML file. They don't actually show said YAML file, so I don't know how complex they are. If they give you the full power of the underlying shell, then yeah, you're back at the exact same problem, but if it's stuff like "invoke this program with this set of arguments," which is what their examples seem like, then I'd expect it to work with any shell as long as that program is installed.

> Perhaps my interpretation was wrong.

And perhaps mine is. The docs aren't in-depth and I don't own a Mac. But really, ultimately, "are workflows more portable" isn't a question I personally am wed to; it's that "shell scripts are only portable via UNIXes and there's a much bigger world out there" that I am, and I am hoping that workflows are more portable than shell scripts. In practice, they may be, or they may not be, but since they're in a layer above the shell, it's possible that they're not shell-specific.

Nix(OS) already solves this problem.

I cannot use Nix on my platform, and I’m not changing OSes.

Which platform do you use?

That's a great question! Version controlled shell scripts are very useful (and in fact workflows in Warp can also be version controlled) but they still have a few problems: 1) Documentation--when a repo has a lot of shell scripts, it can be very difficult to know which command to run in certain situations. Even if each shell script has documentation, there's no way to find that documentation natively from the terminal itself. 2) Searching--you can only execute commands from the terminal based on the shell script name but there's no easy way to search for a script based on _what_ it does or any other metadata.

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