2.3 release reminders about googler

[jarun]

I'm not pressuring you to cut a release

No probs, it's not happening before next weekend anyway ;).

[jarun]

@zmwangx I have taken care of item 1 and 3. Planning a release this weekend.

[zmwangx]

👍

[professorjamesmoriarty]

Updated the -git package here and the completions seem to work great. Might even try using fish myself... lol. Will update main package accordingly when ready.

[jarun]

@shaggytwodope we will make a release this weekend, most probably tomorrow. Stay tuned! ;)

[jarun]

@shaggytwodope @zmwangx released v2.3. Things look quite stable.
Sorry, I couldn't complete the testing by morning. Got real sleepy around 4AM.

@shaggytwodope Fish shell is awesome. You may need to switch to bash for serious scripting. But productivity-wise Fish is kick-ass with its auto-completion for commands, manpages and history. Some way or other it will always pick up the stuff you wanted to type.

[professorjamesmoriarty]

@jarun awesome, aur package updated.

I will eventually give fish a try... need to find time to move from zsh.

[jarun]

Thank you! 👍

[zmwangx]

Submitted Homebrew/homebrew-core#558.

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Speaking of shells, I've tried fish before and was not particularly impressed. It's a good shell out of the box, but that's pretty much it, there's not much room for improvement AFAIK; whereas Zsh is customizable in almost every fashion imaginable. When done right (this is important), there's more granularity in Zsh than in any other shell, especially in terms of completions. With the possible exceptions of syntax highlighting and predictive typing. There are zsh-syntax-highlighting and zsh-auto-suggestions, but I'm not at all impressed by those. Fortunately I'm not a fan of either feature. I find syntax highlighting in shell rather useless most of the time (shell commands are usually pretty simple and you don't need "googler" in blue to know it's a command; and when shell commands get complicated, especially with Zsh's rich expansion facilities, syntax highlighting can't keep up anyway) and even somewhat distracting when the color jumps around the spectrum as you type (g red, go blue, goo red, goog red, googl red, google blue, googler blue...). As for predictive typing, completion system does most of the job, and if I'm typing something over and over which can't be helped by the completion system, I'll just make an alias (sometimes directory local ones, I have a ton of those), problem solved.

My other problem with fish is its non-POSIX syntax. I can't copy from the command line into scripts and vice versa, and that's very counter-productive, considering how many scripts I write.

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By the way, I seriously recommend serious scripting in Zsh instead of Bash. Zsh's expansions are so rich, they simply work wonders and save you tons of time. On the very surface level, not having to quote parameter expansion, and being able to expand an array with $array instead of "${array[@]}" are already big wins both in productivity and security. I'll just give one (ubiquitous) example of why it's superior to Bash for scripting. When you write scripts you often want to know the absolute path of the script in order to call other scripts from the same or related directories, and/or find data in relevant locations. (Very simple demand, the single most upvoted bash question on SO.) In Zsh this is as simple as

here=$0:A:h

:A for expanding to the absolute path, :h for taking the dirname. In Bash this is almost mission impossible, unless you write a path resolver (which is of course possible in pure bash, but good luck doing that in every single script). You can try external commands, say readlink or realpath, but there's no cross-platform way to do it, because realpath is not always available, and BSD readlink is incompatible with coreutils readlink. Neither is POSIX anyway. In the end I usually just resort to Perl:

here="$(perl -e 'use File::Basename; use Cwd "abs_path"; print dirname(abs_path(@ARGV[0]));' -- "$0")"

Very sad.

[jarun]

Looks like I have to try out Zsh.

Thanks for the cool release guys! I am happy with where we have reached so far with googler.

[zmwangx]

Looks like I have to try out Zsh.

No obligation, interactive shell is mostly a personal preference. Fish to Zsh is definitely a hard sell, it's almost impossible to convince someone to dig into configurations once he's used to an excellent out-of-box experience; but to me, Zsh configuration is almost an art 😃 If you do want to try Zsh though, make sure to take a look at https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto/ .

I feel stronger about Zsh vs Bash for noninteractive use. IMO there's hardly any reason to use Bash over Zsh beyond availability (which isn't a problem for personal use), so do try to write Zsh for personal scripts, you'll enjoy it.

[zmwangx]

Merged in Homebrew 😃

[jarun]

👍