Headless Mode

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Tips

• Use push-registers { foo } to avoid clobbering $?, BASH_REMATCH, and other registers (VM globals).

Resources

• Blog Posts tagged #headless
  • Oil's Headless Mode Should Be Useful for UI Research (Notes on the HotOS Unix Shell Panel)
• https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/headless.html
• Shell as an Engine for a GUI or TUI: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/738
• web_shell prototype: https://github.com/subhav/web_shell/blob/master/command_server.sh
  • descriptor passing would be nice. Uses LD_PRELOAD to trick bash into thinking it's running from a terminal.
• #shell-gui on Zulip has many discussions: https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/266977-shell-gui

TODO

• Demo of how to pass a pipe, and e.g. dump JSON (is our json builtin stable? Or does read --json and read --qtt make more sense?)
• command line option --source (global) (or should it be --use (namespaced) ?)
• Document "registers" ?
• More docs on how to implement a headless client. Join #shell-gui on Zulip for discussion!