Emix

Emix lets a modern Unix machine present itself as an older computer — and, when you ask it to, run that computer's real software on your real files.

Those are two different things, and Emix keeps them clearly apart:

• A personality is not an emulator. emix cpm reproduces CP/M's commands, syntax, output formats and error messages in Python, over ordinary host files. No 8080 is involved.
• An application is. A>ED LETTER.TXT loads a real ED.COM and executes real Z80 instructions through RunCPM, on a document staged from your own folder. Emix owns the drives, the filenames and what comes back out; it does not own the CPU.

Emix ships no operating systems and no applications — you supply software you already have, and Emix supplies the knowledge of how to drive it.

The full guide is docs/MANUAL.md.

Three personalities ship today:

They are not three programs. They are three vocabularies over one engine, and the differences between them — CP/M's NEW=OLD argument order, DCL's abbreviations and /QUALIFIERS, CMS's three-token FILENAME FILETYPE FILEMODE — are what the engine exists to express.

Install

uv tool install emix-shell     # or: pipx install emix-shell
emix cpm

To try it without installing anything:

uvx --from emix-shell emix cpm

The distribution is emix-shell but the command is emix, which is why uvx needs --from. PyPI rejects the bare name emix as too similar to the existing emux, emx and emi projects.

To update later, ask Emix — it knows how it was installed and offers the matching command rather than guessing:

emix --update

Emix has no runtime dependencies beyond Python 3.11 or newer. If uv warns that ~/.local/bin is not on your PATH, run uv tool update-shell and open a new terminal.

From source

Running from a checkout needs no install step at all:

git clone https://github.com/rdubar/emix && cd emix
./emix cpm

or install the working tree, or the repository directly:

uv tool install .
uv tool install git+https://github.com/rdubar/emix

Use

The current directory becomes the first drive. Mount more with --mount, which is repeatable; drives are named in each personality's own style, so the first mount is A: under CP/M, DKA0: under VMS and filemode A under CMS.

Settings can persist in ~/.config/emix/emix.toml — the personality to start, drives to mount, hint colour, whether to be strict. Command line always wins.

emix cpm                                  # . becomes A:
emix cpm --mount ~/Documents --mount ~/src  # A: and B:
emix vms --mount ~/Documents              # DKA0:
emix cms --mount ~/Documents              # filemode A
emix cpm -c "DIR *.TXT"                   # run one command and exit

Real CP/M applications

With an emulator installed separately, Emix can open a host document in real CP/M software. Set it up once (see the manual), then:

A>APPS
DDT        DDT.COM        DDT
ED         ED.COM         ED-CPM
MBASIC     MBASIC.COM     MBASIC
TE         TE.COM         TE-CPM

A>ED NEW.TXT

NEW FILE
     : *I
    1:  Dear Gary,
    2:  The BDOS is a triumph.
    3:
     : *E

DOCUMENT SESSION COMPLETE

  CREATED   NEW.TXT
  IGNORED   NEW.$$$  (the application's own backup)

Save these changes to the host? [Y/n]

That is Digital Research's ED.COM from 1982, executing real Z80 instructions, editing a file in your own folder. MBASIC gets you Microsoft BASIC-85 5.29; DDT gets you the debugger.

Only the document you named is staged, so the program cannot see the rest of the folder. The editor's own scratch file is named but not committed. The write is atomic, and is refused if Emix sees that the host file changed while the guest ran (checked before the write, though a write landing inside the final handoff can still be lost).

What is authentic and what is not

Emix aims to be recognisable, and says so when it is not.

Authentic. CP/M's six CCP built-ins are exactly the six it had; PIP and STAT are listed separately because they were transient .COM programs loaded from disk, not built-ins. REN NEW=OLD and PIP DEST=SOURCE keep their surprising destination-first order. DCL verbs abbreviate to any unambiguous prefix. DELETE demands an explicit version, as VMS did. CMS answers Ready; T=... after every command and Ready(00028); after a failure. Error messages follow each system's house format — NO FILE, %RMS-E-FNF, file not found, DMSxxx002E File 'X' not found.

Deliberately not authentic. ERA confirms every erase, where CP/M only confirmed for ERA *.*, because these are your real files. Names that do not fit 8.3 are shown in full rather than truncated, because a listing that names a file you cannot then type is worse than a misaligned column, so a long name is shown as a reversible alias — pyproject.toml lists as PYPROJ_1 TOM, and TYPE PYPROJ_1.TOM reads it back without ever renaming the host file. ABOUT and CREDIT are shared Emix commands in every personality, as are APPS, EXPLAIN and STRICT. HELP, CLS, VER, UNIX and DRIVES are further Emix conveniences and are labelled as such in HELP. File versions display as ;1 but only one copy is stored.

Not yet built. CP/M user areas, VMS directory syntax and real file versions, CMS EXEC and XEDIT, and SAVE, which copied memory Emix does not have. See docs/ROADMAP.md. More speculative jokes, atmosphere and optional AI experiments live in docs/IDEAS.md.

Assistance

Emix helps you find the period command without pretending to be a system that accepted yours:

$ ls
%DCL-W-IVVERB, unrecognized command verb - check validity and spelling
Emix: OpenVMS has no ls. To list the files, use DIRECTORY.

$ DELETE FOO.TXT
%DELETE-W-NOVER, explicit version number required
$ EXPLAIN
Emix: DELETE needs an explicit version, as in FILE.TXT;1. VMS kept every
Emix: version of a file, so a delete without one was too easy to get wrong.

Three rules make this safe to leave on: the authentic response prints first and unaltered, every added line is marked Emix:, and nothing is ever run on a guess — a hint names the command, you type it. That is the difference between assistance that teaches the old system and assistance that replaces it.

Output from commands the original system never had is printed in the hint colour too, so nothing non-period is mistaken for period output. Each personality decides: CP/M's HELP is painted because CP/M had none, while VMS's stays plain because VMS had one.

Emix asks the terminal what colour it is — COLORFGBG first, then an OSC 11 query — and answers in green phosphor on a dark screen, amber on a light one. A terminal that will not say gets amber, which is legible on either. --hint-colour cyan (or $EMIX_HINT_COLOUR) picks another; $NO_COLOR and any non-terminal output disable it, because escape codes in a pipe are corruption rather than decoration.

STRICT ON, or --strict, removes all of it. Scripts and pipes are strict by default, because a script must not depend on a guess. Tab completion stays on either way: it changes what you type, never what runs.

Safety

Emix runs on your real home directory, so the boundaries are explicit and tested:

• Drives are sealed. Every path is resolved through the host layer and checked against its drive root after symlinks are followed, so a symlink pointing out of a drive is neither readable nor listed. Directory traversal, absolute paths and separators in file names are rejected.
• No shell is ever invoked. Unknown CP/M commands are offered to the host as executables via subprocess with an argument list. Because there is no shell, |, >, &&, $VAR and backticks are literal arguments rather than operators. Exit Emix when you want a real shell. VMS and CMS do not fall through at all; use RUN/SPAWN and CMS.
• Case ambiguity fails loudly. On a case-sensitive host holding both readme.txt and README.TXT, Emix reports the ambiguity rather than silently picking whichever the filesystem happened to list first.
• Destructive commands confirm, and anything but an explicit Y/YES means no.

Erasing a file in Emix erases it on the host. That is the point of the project, and the reason for everything above.

Development

uv sync           # create the environment
uv run pytest     # the full suite
uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check .
uv run mypy       # strict

Layout:

src/emix/
  errors.py         symbolic error codes, worded by each personality
  host.py           drives: containment, case folding, ambiguity
  shell.py          the REPL, verb table, abbreviation, host fallthrough
  cli.py            argument parsing, drive mounting, subcommands
  assist.py         hints, translations and explanations; never executes
  config.py         settings that persist between sessions
  personalities/    cpm.py, vms.py, cms.py — vocabulary and house style
  apps/             document sessions in real historical applications

Adding a personality means one module and one line in personalities/__init__.py. Verbs are methods marked with @verb; the base class handles parsing, dispatch, confirmation, history and errors.

Status

Emix is an early experiment. Version 0.2 is on PyPI and is useful for real file browsing today, on macOS and on a Raspberry Pi 5 — the case-sensitive filesystem there is the interesting case, and it caught a bug that macOS structurally could not.

Release notes are in CHANGELOG.md. The roadmap covers where it goes next, including whether Emix should eventually execute genuine CP/M .COM binaries in a sandbox — and why that turns out to be less frightening than it sounds.

MIT licensed.