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What next?

Congratulations for making it through the workshop. Most people, if they ever undertake a toy shell, stop around stage 1 or 2. You should at this point have a shell you could actually use as an interactive shell for a while. (Estimated length of time before it becomes too annoying, in my experience: about one month.)

I think there is a lot to be done with shells in general. I'll list here some starting points you might find interesting.

security: capabilities / pledge

The shill project has some interesting ideas. ksh in openbsd has a pledge builtin. Can you make your shell scripts safer? What about your interactive shell sessions? Or the dreaded curl | sh?

features from other programming languages

  • advisory safety through annotation of commands with types describing their input or output

  • logic or constraint-based mechanisms -- for example, instead of globbing with wildcards, why not file-name unification?

  • example-based program synthesis

interactive ergonomics

  • autodetect completions from manpage or --help output

  • perhaps one could even come up with a clever unobtrusive manpage excerpt display not unlike popup help in many IDEs

  • real-time visualization of what will happen when a pipeline is executed

  • visualization of CPU/IO usage of elements of running pipeline

integration with commonly-used software

  • if your shell is in a VM-based language like Java or Erlang, you could speed up loading of other code in the same language, like the Android zygote concept

  • you probably have many git-related tweaks to your current shell; could these be faster or tighter if you linked to libgit2 directly?

  • what about integration with screen or tmux?

  • what if you extended pipe syntax to conveniently support arbitrary sockets or ssh connections?

  • GNU parallel is a very popular tool; is it possible to provide its major features directly in a shell?

See also dgsh.

alternative uses of the shell

  • it's often been noted that make and cron, maybe with a dash of inotify, could have better integration with the shell, or be their own combined tool entirely.

  • could you build a shell fuzzing or testing tool using what you have so far?