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by dmix 2543 days ago
Interesting. Having the core terminal/language down is a good start. An important part of any terminal will be it's support for plugins/extensions or otherwise natively replacing them the way Fish tries to do.

I've recently started using https://elv.sh/ as my primary terminal after testing it out on/off for 2yrs and slowly porting old ZSH aliases/scripts into the Elvish language (very similar to Go which it runs on), coming from a decade on ZSH. There's a lot of opportunity in this space.

ZSH with the full suite of packages with autosuggestions and various other plugins (which I've grown fully dependent on) can get very slow on initial terminal loads, even with tracing and optimization.

Smaller tools like ripgrep and exa both written in rust help speed up common terminal commands: https://github.com/ogham/exa

3 comments

The right term for what you refer to as terminal(s) is shell.

A terminal (or a terminal emulator) is not a shell and, moreover, a shell does not necessarily require a terminal.

Yeah of course... I use kitty as a terminal emulator with elvish as a default shell: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

Elvish is also a lightweight programming language like bash and zsh. Which is an underrated part of using shells (bash and zsh are quite awful even given the constraints of shell scripting and POSIX).

I've also recently started using elvish as my default shell full time and I really love it! Still needs some kinks worked out, but it's a very powerful shell. And pretty easy to pick up!

For anyone interested, here's a good article with some tips about working with/customizing elvish: https://zzamboni.org/post/my-elvish-configuration-with-comme...

can you share these zsh to elvish ports?
Yes, I intend to publish them soon when I’m more comfortable with it. I’ve only switched over this month and it’s changing often.

I released a vim plugin in the meantime: https://github.com/dmix/elvish.vim

And zzamboni on github has some good starting dot-files which I forked initially. https://github.com/zzamboni/dot-elvish

Otherwise I’m interested in creating an oh-my-elvish type library in the future.

Yes, please...and also your experience with elvish in general?