shellserver 0.0.11

Server to aid shell navigation.

ShellServer

It's a mix of Starship and Zoxide but faster.

On Starship, every 'Enter' keystroke spawns a new process, which may cause a lag between prompts.
Zoxide will raise a new process every time you call it.
ShellServer raises the server only in the first shell creation and will communicate with your shell on every 'Enter' keystroke.
Fastness comes from not having spawning time, which seems to be way higher in Windows.

But if your hardware gives you a fluid shell experience using Starship, I recommend that you keep with it because it's way more customizable.

Features

Prompt with a fast glance at what is in directory

This is the most bloated prompt that you will get. It will indicate the existence of Python, C, C++, Lua, Node and PowerShell files on directory.
The compilers searched are GCC and G++.

No lag from spawning processes

Better 'cd'

• p -o path for writing to output. Tool for things like move somefile (p -o somepath)
• p behaves like cd for unknown paths

Note: fzf is a dependency to use 'pz'

Switching Theme

Can take four arguments: all, system, terminal, and blue.

• terminal: Toggles Windows Terminal default theme.
• system: Toggles system wide Dark Mode.
• blue: Toggles 'Blue light reduction'.
• all: Same as not passing arguments. Do all the above.

The system option is not working properly on Windows 11 22h2...

Searching history

Listing directory

Customization

The server will look for a .shellserver.toml in the user home directory. Only two options will be searched right now.

# Windows Terminal themes
dark_theme = '...'  # defaults to Tango Dark
light_theme = '...'  # Solarized Light

CLI

The server knows how many clients it haves and will know if you quit shell with 'exit'
but if window is closed on 'X' it may outlive the shell.

usage: shellserver [-h] {kill,clear}

positional arguments:
  {kill,clear}  "kill" to kill the server, "clear" to clear the cache.

options:
  -h, --help    show this help message and exit

Requirements

• Python 3.9+ or latest Pypy (still slower than Python 3.11)
• PowerShell 6.2+ (I think)
• Any NerdFont (I use MesloGS NF)
• A xterm compatible terminal

Installation

Currently, ShellServer will work only in PowerShell on Windows.

> pip install shellserver  # or pip install --user shellserver
> Install-Module ShellServer -Scope CurrentUser

In your PowerShell profile:

# By the beginning of the file
pythonw -m shellserver  # note the 'w'

# By the end of the file
Import-Module ShellServer

Keep updated

As many things might change in versions below 0.1.0, pip install --upgrade shellserver and Upgrade-Module ShellServer must be run both when one changes.
v0.0.8+ will work with the PowerShell ShellServer module 0.0.6+.

Debugging

The git status info still experimental, do pythonw -m shellserver --use-git in your profile to always use git.

Any errors that occur will be saved in $env:localappdata\shellserver\traceback.

Attach a stdout to the server, pass --verbose to it and it will give the time taken for each communication.
--verbose --git-verbose will give lot of info when it sees a git repo.

> shellserver kill
# A message that the server is not responding and your prompt will be like before.
> python -m shellserver --verbose --git-verbose  # no w, blocking

Open another shell and walk to a git repo.

The server can accept --let-crash argument to let errors propagate. --use-git will have preference over this.

There are also:

• --disable-git
• --wait: We will use our 'gitstatus' subpackage for repos up to 2500 index entries. Will use git otherwise, unless this flag is set.

On Pwsh module:

• Set-ServerTimeout: arg in ms.
• Set-ServerOpt: Set options in runtime:
  • enable-git
  • disable-git
  • use-git: Use git.exe for git status info
  • wait: Use 'gitstatus' subpackage no matter how big is repo
  • verbose
  • let-crash: At this point it's probably useless