browsh

recording.webm

A web-based shell with first-class lua support.

Why? Terminals are nice, but they're stuck with plain text. They can't mix fonts or display buttons or forms. TUI style interfaces are non-trivial to make and almost certainly require a dependency. It'd be great if programs were able to output some form of markup to describe how to render their output... If only there was a standardized markup language that's widely used...

browsh is a shell that runs in the browser. Programs output arbitrary HTML which gets rendered in the UI. They can even output forms which are then submitted to standard input as json.

Lua support

Shells are great for interactive use or one-liners, but they fall short when you need a real programming language (there's a reason all major distros ship python).

Instead of inventing yet another shell language, browsh embeds lua allowing you to escape into a real language when needed.

cat myfile.go | :lua {
    longest = ""
    for line in sh.stdin do
        for w in line:gmatch("%w+") do
            if #w > #longest then longest = w end
        end
    end
    sh.print("longest identifier:", longest)
}

Lua blocks are treated as normal commands, meaning they can be used in pipes.

cat server.log
| :lua {
  for line in sh.stdin do
    local h, m, s, msg = line:match("(%d%d):(%d%d):(%d%d) .-%[ERROR%] (.*)")
    if h then
      local secs = h*3600 + m*60 + s
      sh.print(secs .. " " .. msg)
    end
  end
}
| sort -n

Notice how pipes can be separated by newlines? browsh fixes posix shell rules. No more ugly \ |.

Usage

Run make to build browsh.