Home

Welcome to the oil wiki!

For Users

• How To Test OSH
• Shell Programs That Run Under OSH
• Oil Deployments
• Migration Guide
• Where To Send Feedback
• Why Use Oil?
• Shell Advocacy
  • How to understand shell: Slogans, Fallacies, and Concepts
  • How to use shell: Patterns and Anti-Patterns

For Developers

• Contributing / Spec Tests
  • Developing Oil With Nix
• Travis CI for Oil
• Git Tips -- Patterns for using Git on this project.
• Testing the Interactive Shell -- a bunch of manual test cases
• Debugging Completion Scripts -- the useful --debug-file flag!
• Using Zephyr ASDL
• Implementing the Oil Expression Language
• Fish Oil Brainstorming

Docs and Writing:

• #oil-documentation on Zulip
• Documentation Strategy
• Technical Writing
• Oil Language Docs

Other:

• Project Goals / Carrots

Implementation Details

• Signal Handling in Oil
• OSH Word Evaluation Algorithm -- shopt -s simple_word_eval

Reference

• External Resources -- External Resources on Unix shells, programming language design, and implementation
  • Alternative Shells
  • Internal DSLs for Shell
• The Biggest Shell Programs in the World

Protocol Designs

• Coprocess Protocol Proposal
• Shellac Protocol Proposal -- for shell-independent command-line completion.
• TSV2 Proposal
• CSTR Proposal

Other Designs

• Language Design Principles
• Structured Data in Oil
  • Structured Data Over Pipes

• Interactive Shell -- Ideas about the interactive shell and possibly graphical shell.
  • Shell Autocompletion
  • Headless Mode - new as of 2021/04! A better, decoupled strategy for the interactive shell.
• Distributed Shell
• Config Dialect

Analysis of Unix Shell

• Shell Security Problems
• Shell WTFs
• Unix Tools -- notes on the things that a shell interacts with. The shell "standard library".
• Little Languages

Programming Language Implementation

• Parsing Case Studies -- What algorithms and tools do production-quality languages use for parsing?
• Bootstrapping Case Studies -- How are languages bootstrapped?
• Lossless Syntax Tree Pattern
• Language Subsets -- an abstract but practical way of specifying a language
• Compact AST Representation
• Architecture of Various Interpreters
• Implementing Debuggers

Programming Language Design

• Language Data Models
• Language Design and Theory of Computation
• Metaprogramming
  • Metaprogramming Use Cases
• Partial Evaluation

Programming Patterns

• Feature Detection Is Better than Version Detection
• Language Composition Bestiary
  • Ad Hoc Protocols in Unix
• Exhaustive Test Suite

Blog Themes / Post Ideas

• Oil Blog Planning
• Parsing is Difficult

Old

• OSH Parser (mostly obsolete)
• OSH Optimization Log (already blogged about stuff after this