Time for the third status update! It’s been an interesting month, with good progress for mrsh as well as some cool sway/wlroots and matcha stuff.

Let’s have a look at my main focus for August: mrsh. It’s a POSIX shell library designed to be minimal (no more than POSIX), simple (read “readable”!) and could be used as a base for more elaborate shells and other tools.

I’ve been helped by sircmpwn, who has added in a few builtins (like set) and special parameters by sending patches on the mailing list. Thank you!

Speaking of parameters, variables are now supported, as well as word expansions. This includes parameter expansion (like $HOME and ${var:-default}) and command substitution (like echo `date`). Tilde expansion (echo ~root), field splitting and pathname expansion (echo *) are implemented, but some work remains to correctly handle all situations.

I’ve added here-documents support, which have a few variations otherwise it wouldn’t be fun (<< vs <<-, <<EOF vs <<'EOF'). In the shell, these are exposed as in-memory files.

Aliases are now working, but I’m still searching for ways to make them better. Since they behave as macros at the parser level, I’m not sure how to handle them relative to line number information.

I’ve also added line number information to the AST (more precisely, offset + line + column numbers). These new features are demonstrated by a little highlight example that reads a shell script from the standard input and prints a highlighted version. For instance:

I’ve tried to design this with linters and formatters in mind: it should be possible to e.g. preserve whitespace while transforming the AST. There’s still some work needed to better handle comments and continuation lines.

All in all, the parser is pretty close from being complete and only a few Hard Issues™ are remaining for the shell itself. The parser is mostly missing arithmetic expansion and a few control structures. If you want to track the overall project status I maintain a detailed issue for this purpose.

In the sway and wlroots universe, we’ve been working on a new gamma control protocol. The old one had issues with large gamma tables on some hardware, and we’ve taken advantage of this opportunity to add in some other minor improvements. I’ve been working on a clipboard manager protocol, but this is still work-in-progress.

There are also good news from Qt: they’ve implemented the xdg-decoration protocol for server-side window decorations.

Finally, I’ve been pushing a few commits to matcha, a very simple Git read-only web interface. It can now [serve multiple repositories] matcha-multiple-repos and supports [server-side syntax highlighting] matcha-syntax. My friend Jean Thomas has been creating a [RPM package] matcha-rpm to ease deployment on Fedora.

EOF. Let me know if you want to contribute to one of these projects! In any case, see you next month!