Open Source Ecosystems

selfish - the shell dyed in your selfish colors

selfish is an experimental shell and a project that will become my life's work. Over my ten-year engineering career, I've used bash, zsh, fish (and indirectly dash). All of them were great shells. However, I haven't found the perfect shell to suit my preferences entirely. So, I decided to create my own. I'll be using selfish in my everyday work and refine it to a level where I can dogfood it.

For the programming language, I've chosen OCaml. Although I'm a Gopher, I wanted to take some time away from Golang, hence the choice of OCaml. Rust, with its functional language elements, was also an appealing option since I plan to study OCaml alongside selfish. However, the project of creating a shell in Rust will likely be undertaken by other clever engineers. The quintessential shell will likely emerge from Rust. I want to create a shell in a different ecosystem with a different methodology.

Development Eviorment Setup

Ref. https://ocaml.org/install

Install the opam package manager
Initialise opam
Activate the opam switch
Set Up an OCaml Development Environment

$ bash -c "sh <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocaml/opam/master/shell/install.sh)"
$ opam init
$ eval $(opam env)
$ opam install ocaml-lsp-server odoc ocamlformat utop

How to build

$ make build

How to install

By default, the shell will be installed in ~/.opam/default/bin/selfish.

$ make install

Implemented Status

Built-in Commands

Command	Implemented	Description
cd	Yes	Change the current working directory.
pwd	Yes	Print the current working directory.
echo	Yes	Display a line of text/string on the standard output.
exit	Yes	Terminate the shell.
alias	No	Create or display command aliases.
export	No	Set environment variables.
unset	No	Unset environment variables.
source/.	No	Execute commands from a file in the current shell.
history	No	Display command history.
jobs	No	Display status of jobs.
fg	No	Bring a job to the foreground.
bg	No	Resume suspended jobs in the background.
kill	No	Send a signal to a process.
umask	No	Set the file mode creation mask.
time	No	Measure program execution time.
type	No	Display information about command type.
wait	No	Wait for process completion.
exec	No	Replace the shell with the specified command.
read	No	Read a line from standard input.
shift	No	Shift positional parameters in a script.
test/[	No	Evaluate conditional expressions.
eval	No	Evaluate arguments as shell script.