Simon Willison’s Weblog

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7 items tagged “shell”

2024

Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool (via) Martin Heinz drops a wealth of knowledge about ways to configure zsh (the default shell on macOS these days) to get better utility from your shell history. # 10th April 2024, 11:17 pm

2020

pyp: Easily run Python at the shell (via) Fascinating little CLI utility which uses some deeply clever AST introspection to enable little Python one-liners that act as replacements for all manner of pipe-oriented unix utilities. Took me a while to understand how it works from the README, but then I looked at the code and the entire thing is only 380 lines long. There’s also a useful --explain option which outputs the Python source code that it would execute for a given command. # 9th May 2020, 9:05 pm

2017

direnv (via) A shell extension (for bash, zsh and others) which can automatically set and unset environment variables when you cd into specific directories. Useful for managing things like a project’s GOPATH or automatically activating Python virtual environments. # 5th November 2017, 7:59 pm

2012

What is a good programming language to learn after bash scripting?

Python is a good natural progression from bash in my opinion. It has an interactive prompt which supports bash-style exploratory programming, and it has libraries that mean it can be applied to an enormous range of problems—everything from game development to scientific computing to web applications.

[... 65 words]

2009

shunit2 (via) xUnit style testing for shell scripts. # 27th September 2009, 7:34 pm

2007

Insert Dojo and YUI bookmarklets. Combine with Jash for interactive API experimentation on any web page. # 9th December 2007, 12:38 pm

Jash: JavaScript Shell (via) An advanced JavaScript interactive shell bookmarklet that works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. # 9th December 2007, 12:36 pm