Zero-install logical adaptive structured shell
Under Heavy Work in Progress.
Launch any POSIX-compatible¹ shell, including remote sessions. By sourcing this file — whether manually or auto-forwarded from another shell instance — you unlock advanced interactive features. These include structured objects, object pipelines, binary data processing, custom class definitions, advanced parameters, automatic help generation, and more. Additionally, Zlash introduces novel capabilities powered by an integrated relational solver, all tailored to your environment without requiring installation, automatically optimized by available, probed tools, with portable fallbacks implemented.
- By a POSIX-compatible shell, we mean any shell that is able to interpret and execute POSIX-compliant shell scripts and interactive commands.
The increasing popularity and proliferation of modern interactive shells¹, terminal emulators², and a large number of new, high-quality CLI/TUI tools/apps³ is a proof of a need that a GUI cannot fulfill generally. That need is the expressive power and replicability that an interactive command-line provides.
The POSIX standard, while foundational in unifying early computing environments, faces limitations, in large part due to its success. Maintaining compatibility with legacy systems and mitigating issues caused, to some extent, by underspecification have hindered its evolution. As a result, modern shells often trade POSIX compliance for advanced functionality.
However, the need for compatibility remains critical. Legacy systems still require maintenance, and many production environments must restrict utilities.
While GNU Autoconf project (likely the best success story in portable complex tool chain) addresses the portability problem by identifying the best POSIX-compatible standard tools available in the environment/system, for its shell functionality it sticks to the lowest common demomenator across all historical possibilities, which is not a huge issue for it since Autoconf is not designed for interactive ergonomics.
Zlash project scope is targeting modernization of POSIX-compatible interactive shells. All of which are moderately-to-severely lacking when compared to modern, but POSIX incompatible shells. We aim to address these challenges by probing for and building on the features available to the current shell.
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Kitty, Wezterm, Ghostty, Alacrity, Warp, Hyper, Extraterm, Tabby (formerly Terminus), Contour, Wave, darktile, rio, cool-retro-term, etc... See: awesome-terminals
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See: awesome-cli-apps-in-a-csv (Searching the page for "Rust" gives 50+ results.)
- POSIX Shell sanity-check of bare-minimum portable functionality
- Core input validation functions
- Shell string quotation for reuse
- String matching
- Dev-env dependency management
- [50%] Core Attributes
- [0%] Core Objects
- [75%] String operations
- [50%] Math
- PN-Counters
- Stacks
- [0%] Iterators