partdavid · HackerTrans

10 bulan yang laludiscuss

I'm extremely interested in pushing along these fronts even in a performative way, because I don't want to get bogged down in "switch away from Emacs" conversations with coworkers. I've done a lot of modernizing on my Emacs setup this year but I would love a current take on "getting close to cursor" that gets me beyond what I'd had set up with copilot and lsp.

partdavid

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

Can you expand on the parallelism features you use and what shell? In bash I've basically given up managing background jobs because identifying and waiting for them properly is super clunky; throttling them is impossible (pool of workers) and so for that kind of thing I've had to use GNU parallel (which is its own abstruse mini-language thing and obviously nothing to do with shell). Ad-hoc but correct parallelism and first class job management was one of the things that got me to switch away from bash.

partdavid

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

The verbosity is optional; most examples you see will be verbose in an effort to be more clear (i.e. Get-ChildItem vs 'gci') but when you have a little experience are typing with Powershell, you'll find the verbosity basically goes away, because you'll be familiar with using aliases and because you won't need abstruse tools and sublanguages (which are more verbose) to do filtering and processing:

  gci *.txt | %{ $tot += $_.length }; echo $tot

That's not more verbose than bash (one way of doing this):

  ls -l *.txt | awk '{ tot += $5 } END { print tot }'

So you'll see the pipeline written (in an example, for clarity), more like:

  Get-ChildItem *.txt | ForEach-Object { $tot += $_.length }; Write-Output $tot

But that's not how you'd usually use it; until/unless you're putting it in a script.

Note that 'ls -l' and guessing that you want to total up field 5 is brittle in way that the Powershell snippet isn't, but I'm leaving that issue aside.

partdavid

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

Powershell works great on MacOS; it's my primary shell.

partdavid

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

Powershell, because it actually is a shell so it's great at easily invoking commands and using their outputs as actual return values, and because it has "programming language" constructs like dependency management in modules, etc.

It has some great tools for user interaction, too, including secure string handling for credentials, a TUI framework, easy parallelism, unit tests and lots more.

partdavid

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

Can you expand on this? What do you mean by it's "mostly not-a-shell."? I don't understand it.

partdavid

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

I'm a Unix user and spent almost all of my professional career in bash, and switched to Powershell for my interactive shell a few years ago.

The nice thing with Powershell is that it's not verbose, but the arcane abbreviations are actually quite a bit easier to remember and discover than bash. What mixes people up is that in documented examples and reusable scripts, it makes sense to use the full, canonical name, which looks aesthetically different coming from a Unix background.

Here's what it might actually look like to check a JSON file that has an array of file metadata objects, and delete the ones that have been processed (this includes one user-defined alias, cfj, for "ConvertFrom-Json"):

  gc queue.json | cfj | where status -eq processed | ri

That seems pretty NON-verbose to me, equivalent to how you'd approach this in bash. Do you have jq installed? If you do, perhaps:

  jq '.[] | select(.status == "processed")' queue.yaml | xargs rm

If you don't have jq I think this gets much longer and is either really brittle (you're doing some kind of adhoc parsing that's terrible) or really heavyweight (like pulling in a pure bash JSON library--they exist) or you're using a one-liner from another programming language (Ruby, Python, something). Or maybe you'd complain to whatever was writing 'queue.json' and ask for a friendlier format, like something terrible and one-off you invented because it's easy to "parse" with awk?).

It's even better if you're dealing with network resources:

  $api = https://api/
  irm $api/queue.json | ?{ $_.status -eq processed } | `
    %{ irm -M Delete $api/files/$_.file }

That shows off another alias of Where-Object how you do a foreach loop in a pipeline. And bash:

  api=https://api/
  curl $api/queue.json | \
    jq '.[] | select(.status == "processed") | .file' | \
    while read file; do curl -X DELETE "$api/files/$file"; done

What probably makes you think Powershell is verbose is that, although that's how I type Powershell, it's not how I document it. If I were documenting it for someone else's use, or incorporating that pipeline into a script or module, I'd write it like this:

  Get-Content -Path queue.yaml | ConvertFrom-Json | `
    Where-Object -Property status -Eq 'processed' | Remove-Item

So it's not like it's verbose while you're using it, but verbosity is something you can reach for for clarity when it's desirable. Likewise, you can see the consistent relationship between these commands and their aliases: gc -> Get-Content, cfy -> ConvertFrom-Yaml, ri -> Remove-Item. So you have options for how verbose you need to be. I find it's very useful to have a spelled-out version for commands I don't use all the time, like 'Get-EC2Instance', and consistent verbs so I can make reasonable guesses at the command name for things I'm even less familiar with.

I didn't want to clutter this with too many examples but I'll reiterate that Powershell is a shell. It invokes your Unix commands just fine. For example, if you forgot what the option to Get-Date is, to get a Unix-style timestamp (it's 'get-date -uf %s' so not exactly hard to use): you can just type 'date +%x'. In the example above, I could have used 'cat' and 'xargs rm' instead of 'gc' and 'ri'. So it's not like you have to buy the whole kit and kaboodle right away, either.

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