luish

A dedicated page with documentation is available at https://luish.rtfd.io. This page is just a summary.

luish: a shell for Linux, written in Rust

luish is intended to replace zsh or bash as your interactive shell, while being very very fast and more modern.

Highlights

  • As fast as dash, with zsh's features. Scripts run as fast as under dash (benchmarks), while interactive use is intended to be as full-featured as zsh.
  • A modern plugin architecture. Plugins can include shell scripts and extensions written in Rhai (a small embedded language) for hooks, prompt variables, Tab completion, and commands. They can be automatically fetched from github and pinned to specific versions. This is builtin functionality.
  • bash's and zsh's scripting extensions. Arrays and associative arrays, [[ ... ]], ${x/pattern/replacement}, typeset, zsh's parameter flags, and pipefail work in scripts and interactively.
  • Instant startup through caching. luish caches the effect of your startup files. A new shell starts instantaneously, even if you are using conda, nvm and the like (which can take several seconds in a normal shell).
  • Modern configuration. Options, aliases, and plugins are set in a TOML file (~/.config/luish/config.toml), with options grouped in meaningful categories.

Short Example

Start luish with:

luish                             # an interactive shell
luish script.sh                   # run a script, as sh script.sh does

and configure it in ~/.config/luish/config.toml:

[options.history]
file = "~/.histfile"
share = true

[alias]
ll = "ls -l"

[plugins.enabled]
std.completion = "*"         # completion for common commands, and git

To configure many machines, you can use a personal plugin posted to github or on a shared drive (Dropbox, for example). This allows you to keep your configuration in a single place, and have it automatically fetched and enabled on every machine you use while having machine-specific configuration run on top of it.

Since plugins can depend on other plugins, your personal plugin can enable a set of plugins that you use, and they will be automatically fetched and enabled.

Where can I get it?

Releases have binaries for Linux on x86_64 and aarch64. The install script picks the right one and puts it in ~/.local/bin:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luispedro/luish/main/install.sh | sh

See the installation instructions for other options. The source is on github.

License: MIT.