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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Murex â An intuitive and content aware shell for a modern command line
tqwhite wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
Could it really be worth it to try to build new shell commands into
muscle memory? How long would it take before
err "some message"
becomes normal?
For me, it would have to offer sexual favors or something to be worth
it. I don't see anything that good otherwise.
esafak wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
Has anyone spent good time with murex AND nushell and ultimately chose
murex?
nickpinkston wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
Upvote just for good historical reference!
Murex were the shells whose excretions were used to make the Tyrian
purple of the Mediterranean. Tyrian referring to Tyre, one of the major
Phoenician city-states.
It was so iconic that the "Punic Wars" are called that because Punic =
Phoenicia = "Purple People".
Carthage was the Phoenician colony that outlasted the home country.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple
cyberpunk wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
Murex is also an extremely expensive front of house trading platform
whose typical installations cost in the millions. I would change the
name tbh.
throwaway894345 wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
Also, the Phoenicians were the descendants of the Canaanites, who
(according to one etymological theory) are also named after the color
purple.
The Phoenicians were a semitic people like the Jews, and they gave
the world its first alphabet which was adopted by both the Hebrews
and the Greeks. The Greeks added vowels, and the Romans adopted that
alphabet and it became roughly the one we use today.
If you go to the Wiki page ( [1] ) and scroll down to the Table of
Letters header, you can see how the letters evolved from Egyptian
hieroglyphs to the letters we use today. Itâs particularly
interesting to me that our letter âBâ (which the greeks called
âbetaâ and which forms the tail end of âalphabetâ) was
originally a house, and the semitic languages called it âbÄtâ
which was their word for house, which you can still see today in
Biblical place names like Bethel (house of GodââElâ was a very
old name for God).
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet
nickpinkston wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
Yea, I loooove that history too.
It's interesting how, unlike Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian
hieroglyphs that were complex systems that came from dedicated
scribes of the court, Phoenicia's alphabet was the kind of
pragmatic system you can imagine a more mercantile society
developing.
It's wild that it turned into the scripts: Latin, Greek, Arabic,
Cyrillic, Hebrew, and beyond.
Also interesting is Chinese script, which was saved from this by
Stalin telling Mao that China should keep its unique writing, which
Russia of course was already doing. Mao did do the simplification,
but he turned away from his previous plan to standardize the latin
script for Chinese.
gausswho wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
It's a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater...
jabedude wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
Murex also has significant religious significance to Jews. It is the
source of the biblically mandated blue threads for four cornered
garments:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet
xyproto wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
I gave it a spin. First it complained about aspell dictionaries, then I
tried installing a package in an effort to improve the prompt from
simply saying "murex":
murex » murex-package install
https://github.com/orefalo/murex-module-starship
\* Getting package from
'https://github.com/orefalo/murex-module-starship'....
Error in `murex-package` (0,1): protocol handler for HTTPS has not
yet been written. Please use git in the mean time (you can do this by
specifying a git extension in the uri)
.murex_modules » murex-package install
https://github.com/orefalo/murex-module-starship.git
\* Getting package from
'https://github.com/orefalo/murex-module-starship.git'....
Cloning into
'/home/aroedset/.murex_modules/murex-module-starship'...
Error in `murex-package` (0,1): \* Package 'murex-module-starship':
Error loading module `starship` in path
`/home/aroedset/.murex_modules/murex-module-starship/starship.mx`:
> \* Missing required executable,
builtin or murex function: `starship`
.murex_modules »
And then the time I allocated for myself for trying out a random shell
I found on the internet was up.
zyode wrote 9 min ago:
You seem pretty harsh considering these all appear to be user error.
You forgot the .git when you tried first, and you donât have
starship installed on your system or on your path.
oguz-ismail wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
$ ./murex-linux-arm64
Loading profile `.murex_preload`
SIGSYS: bad system call
PC=0x18fd0 m=8 sigcode=1
goroutine 498 gp=0x4000283340 m=8 mp=0x4000100808 [syscall]:
syscall.Syscall6(0x1b7, 0xffffffffffffff9c, 0x40000227e0, 0x1,
0x200, 0x0, 0x0)
/opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.24.6/x64/src/syscall/syscall_linux.go:95
+0x2c fp=0x40001119c0 sp=0x4000111960 pc=0xa067c
syscall.faccessat2(0xffffffffffffff9c, {0x4000359fb0?,
0x4000022780?}, 0x1, 0x200)
/opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.24.6/x64/src/syscall/zsyscall_linux_arm64.go:
33 +0x84 fp=0x4000111a20 sp=0x40001119c0 pc=0x9df74
syscall.Faccessat(0xffffffffffffff9c, {0x4000359fb0, 0x27}, 0x1,
0x200)
/opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.24.6/x64/src/syscall/syscall_linux.go:171
+0x3c fp=0x4000111b00 sp=0x4000111a20 pc=0x9c9ec
internal/syscall/unix.Eaccess(...)
...
I'm tired boss
yencabulator wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
faccessat2 was added in Linux 5.8 in August 2020. Maybe it's time for
you to upgrade your distro?
oguz-ismail wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Why? Everything else works fine
yencabulator wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
For values of "fine" that are on fire.
URI [1]: https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-cat...
BrouteMinou wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
It looks like PowerShell, or nushell that also looks like PowerShell.
Did you know you can install PowerShell on Linux too?
ItsHarper wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
PowerShell is so much clunkier than nutshell, which is truly a
delight. Haven't tried murex.
fainpul wrote 6 hours 8 min ago:
Not sure what you find clunky about PowerShell. On the other hand,
I find nushell not mature enough to be usable. The very basics -
displaying command output in lists and tables - is totally broken
as soon as some long strings appear in the output. Various issues
about this are logged, but nobody seems to care. [1]
URI [1]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/13601
URI [2]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/16379
liampulles wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
Because I need the scripts and snippets I write for my repos to work
for other developers, I'm going to write them to be bash compatible.
That applies also to scripts and snippets written by others that I
consume.
So if a shell is not bash syntax compatible, then it really has to
offer some astonishingly useful features to offset my having to
translate and map the scripts I need to run for it.
Murex does not interpret "$(cmd args)". So unfortunately, I cannot use
it. I know it's not fair, and I know that is promoting a lock-in of
what shells can do, but I need to get shit done I'm afraid.
MangoToupe wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
I just write everything in fish and have an LLM translate it to bash.
Freed up a couple brain cells for more useful things for sure.
sholladay wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Newer versions of Fish have significantly improved bash
compatibility. The LLM may actually be making things harder for you
than they need to be.
kstrauser wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
The single biggest win there was that it understands âexport
foo=barâ now, which is probably 90% of what Iâd ever copy and
paste into a shell.
moondev wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
You should consider putting a shebang at the top of your scripts
instead of leaving it to fate
liampulles wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
I do this for all the scripts I write. That does cover one of the
scenarios I covered above, which is valid.
rafram wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
Then thereâs no reason you canât use a different shell as
your interactive shell, while running your scripts in bash.
kstrauser wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
A thousand times this. I use bash scripting for things Iâm
going to distribute, but do all my local CLI work and scripting
in fish because lifeâs too short to wear the bash hair shirt
when I donât have to.
esafak wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
bash: what you feel like doing with your head trying to get
work done in it.
liampulles wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
For me to develop my scripts it would help alot if my
interactive shell supports the syntax as well. I mean you are
right of course, I CAN do that, but it then becomes a tradeoff
question again of whether this non-compatible interactive shell
has sufficient niceties.
sholladay wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
I agree with you. Have you tried Fish? I find it to be the
perfect balance of these goals. It has lots of niceties,
which for me was already enough to switch to it years ago.
But lately, theyâve been adding lots of bash compatibility,
which has made it even more awesome.
liampulles wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
I will check it out, cheers
oneeyedpigeon wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
What happened to the convention that shell names end in sh? There are:
grep sh$ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
1959
options available; surely we haven't exhausted them all?!
Y_Y wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
Balderdash! Sorry to be standoffish, but you must distinguish between
dictionaries. My distro has chosen to impoverish me with a
nightmarish 315.
(wamerican 2017.08.24-1 from Ubuntu 18.04)
bckr wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
This is instead named for an animal with a shell
viraptor wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
A few of those ideas are also in
URI [1]: https://www.nushell.sh/
kitd wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
Interesting. Looks similar to nushell [1] which also is
data-encoding-aware.
URI [1]: https://www.nushell.sh/
xalava wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
Thanks for pointing it out. I've tried both as interactive shells for
a few minutes. Murex seems to have a more minimalist approach that
works well as a drop-in replacement.
However, I have trouble understanding some design decision, such as
inventing redundant keywords. And I've spotted bugs in boths (e.g. ls
--literal fails in nu, and the completion proposes it twice in
Murex).
esafak wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
ls --literal does not exist, that's why. Try man.
wyan wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
Wasn't Murex some sort of backend software for financial institutions?
sockmeistr wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
They're still going, are nice and litigious, and actively defend
their trademarks. I'm kind of surprised they haven't sent a cease and
desist already.
rollcat wrote 8 hours 21 min ago:
It's a spaceship from Warframe.
NB story spoilers. < [1] >
URI [1]: https://wiki.warframe.com/w/Murex
pasc1878 wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
Not just backend - it replaced the front end system I wrote for FX
options (after I left the bank)
jmcomets wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Still is. It's a French/Lebanese corp based in Paris/Beirut. I worked
there for a few years early in my career.
mikl wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
Maybe Iâm just not the target audience, but looking at the front
page, I donât see what actual problems this solves. The claims sound
nice, but without examples of what they mean in real world use, itâs
not really compelling.
roger_ wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
Agreed.
The nushell homepage, by comparison, immediately conveys the benefits
of that project.
_notreallyme_ wrote 13 hours 15 min ago:
I may be wrong, but it gives me some powershell vibe. Since it seems
to be targeted for macOS, I would assume it "solves" the lack of
powershell equivalent on Mac ?
SvenL wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
On Mac and Linux you can use powershell core:
URI [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/ins...
amonith wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
Powershell 7+ (a long while ago named core) is the version you
should use on ALL platforms, including Windows. It's just the
most recent version.
"Core" gives off a vibe that it is some limited thingy. It's not,
it's full PS.
rusk wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
Oh goody
h33t-l4x0r wrote 13 hours 38 min ago:
This looks interesting, I will consider switching if it's not sluggish
like zsh was that one day I tried it.
iberator wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
Back in the 486 era? same here hehe
ksh for life :p
klibertp wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
It takes 3.5 seconds for a new login shell to open on my laptop,
which has a decent CPU and a fast SSD. I do have quite a few lines
of config, but no oh-my-zsh and almost no plugins. I have around 2k
SLOC of ZSH config.
Meanwhile, I have 22.3k SLOC of Emacs Lisp config, and Emacs starts
up (granted, after lowering bytecode to native code AOT) in ~4
seconds. To me, that suggests there's something really wrong with
ZSH in terms of performance - unfortunately, it's better in almost
every other way compared to BASH, so I learned to live with that.
Still, at least in my setup, ZSH indeed is slow, even on modern
hardware. I wonder if it would even run on a 486...
cb321 wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
That sounds way too long. Mine takes like 15 ms on a 2015 cpu
and I activate zsh-syntax-highlighting and new style completion
and everything, but yeah oh-my-zsh often adds nutso overhead.
Anyway, I suggest you profile your zsh start-up. Here's one
copy-paste friendly way to do that:
(PS4='+$EPOCHREALTIME ' zsh -licx exit)2>err
era=$(grep
'^+[1-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].[0-9]*'
startup-profile
(Note for $EPOCHREALTIME to work you need a `zmodload
zsh/datetime` somewhere early on. I might suggest at the top of
`$ZDOTDIR/.zshenv` for this kind of thing.)
Also, if something seems limited by "just parsing", you can
usually speed that up a lot with `zcompile`. I do that with a
`.zcompdump.zwc` and a `digraphs.zsh.zwc`.
EDIT: I noticed myself that really large HISTSIZE (in the 100s of
thousands, and with such limit realized) combined with
de-duplication seems to be a bad combination. I just lowered my
HISTSIZE with a when-too-big spool-off for longer term
history/cold storage.
klibertp wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
> I noticed myself that really large HISTSIZE
...right, I totally forgot that. Yeah, my history file is
4.5MB, and $HISTSIZE is 1M. I even wrote a Scala app[1] some
time ago to collect hist files from all my machines (I used
many more than the current 2, at some point), merging and
deduping them once a day. Adding to that, it's 13 years old at
this point, and probably has quite a few KB of mis-pasted text
files in it, so I guess it makes sense it's this large. It also
makes sense that processing it takes a while, especially with
deduping enabled.
I'll check, but if that's the reason, then I'd be reluctant to
do anything with it. Having fzf search through all my command
lines dating back to 2012 is very valuable. I'll see how that
would work with spooling.
Thanks for the profiling tip, I'll check it out! As mentioned,
I'm not thinking of jumping ship, so I'm willing to do some
digging to make the situation better :) [1]
EDIT: yeah, history is the reason:
-ⶠtime HISTFILE=/dev/null zsh -c 'echo $ERL_AFLAGS' #
variable from the end of my .zshrc
-kernel shell_history enabled
HISTFILE=/dev/null zsh -c 'echo $ERL_AFLAGS' 0,20s user
0,03s system 98% cpu 0,233 total
URI [1]: https://github.com/piotrklibert/zsh-merge-hist
cb321 wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
In that case, since you are already de-duping "externally",
you might play with `setopt HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS
HIST_IGNORE_DUPS HIST_SAVE_NO_DUPS` combinations. It's been
many years since I looked at it, but I think these conspire
with large saved histories to slow things down a lot at
startup/initial history parse.
I don't even recall if it's necessary or was just the simple
algorithm. So, you might actually be able to get Zsh fixed
if there is some quadratic thing that can be turned linear
with a hash table. The Zsh mailing list is quite
accommodating in my experience.
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