A friendly and expressive Unix shell

This project aims to explore the potentials of the Unix shell. It is a work in progress; things will change without warning. The issues list contains many things I'm working on.

This README documents the development aspect of Elvish. All other information is to be found on the official website.

Here is a logo, which happens to be how Elvish looks like when you type elvish into it:

Building Elvish

Go >= 1.6 is required. Linux is fully supported. It is likely to work on BSDs and Mac OS X. Windows is not supported yet.

Elvish is a go-gettable package, and can be installed using go get github.com/elves/elvish.

If you are lazy and use bash or zsh now, here is something you can copy-paste into your terminal:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
mkdir -p $GOPATH

go get github.com/elves/elvish

for f in ~/.bashrc ~/.zshrc; do
    printf 'export %s=%s\n' GOPATH '$HOME/go' PATH '$PATH:$GOPATH/bin' >> $f
done

How To Write Go Code explains how $GOPATH works.

Users of macOS can build Elvish via homebrew:

brew install --HEAD elvish

Name

In roguelikes, items made by the elves have a reputation of high quality. These are usually called elven items, but I chose "elvish" because it ends with "sh". It also rhymes with fish, one of shells that influenced the philosophy of Elvish.

The word "Elvish" should be capitalized like a proper noun. However, when referring to the elvish command, use it in lower case with fixed-width font.

Whoever practices the elvish way by either contributing to it or simply using it is called an elf. (You might have guessed this from the name of the GitHub organization.) The official adjective for elvish (as in "Pythonic" for Python, "Rubyesque" for Ruby) is "elven".