Re: Bash Script Editing Mode?

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

formido <formido@gmail.com> writes:

> There's a shell mode, but it has a prompt and doesn't help you
> incrementally create a shell script as efficiently as it could, unless
> I'm missing something. Is there any shell script mode that works more
> like the elisp, python, or erlang repls, where you can execute your
> choice of several lines at once and you can go back and edit and
> execute the lines in situ? If I write a bash function, editing and
> reloading the function is a painful process. I'm looking for something
> a little bit like the Mac's BBEdit shell worksheets (only better).


First, try to get your terminology straight.  You want a
shell-script-mode that be more like shell-mode, not a shell-mode
that's a different shell-script-mode.

That is, when you type M-x shell RET, you get a buffer that is in the
shell-mode, where you can edit a shell command, and when you type RET,
you get it executed.

On the other hand, when you type C-x C-f ~/bin/new-script RET M-x
shell-script-mode RET yo uget a buffer that is in the
shell-script-mode, where you can edit a shell script,  but indeed for
now, you cannot have them executed from here.


> I considered altering the usual shell mode, but it would take more
> than slight edits, so I'm hoping something's already out there. For
> example, one should be able to go back to a function, tweak it, and
> reload with a minimum of keyboard fuss.

Well, if you consider the shell mode, there's an easy way to get what
you want:  just edit your commands, one by one, and type RET to try
them.  When you're happy with the result, type: history RET and
copy-and-paste all the commands to a shell script buffer, add some
minor edits, including a #!/bin/bash on the first line, and voilà.


But really, I would rather start from the shell-script-mode.  What is
missing, it's the parsing for shell-script "sexprs".   That is, keys
such as C-M-f are still bound to forward-sexp that parses a lisp sexp
instead of a shell one.  (The problem of course is that it's much
harder to parse a shell expression).

Anyways, you could implement some minimal parser.  It'd need to know
about continuation lines, <<EOF ... EOF literal input, ( ... ), $(
... ), $(( ... )), { ... } with the syntax before for the function
declaration, and the syntax of the compound builtins such as if/fi,
case/esac, etc.

Once you have implemented a pair of functions forward-shell-expression
and backward-shell-expression, you can easily implement a function
such as eval-last-shell-expression:

(defun eval-last-shell-expression (point)
  (interactiev "P")
  (let ((start (progn (backward-shell-expression) (point)))
        (end   (progn (forward-shell-expression)  (point))))
    (comint-send-string (inferior-shell-proc)
                        (buffer-substring start end))
    (comint-send-string (inferior-shell-proc) "\n")))

There remains only to bind these commands to C-M-f, C-M-b and C-x C-e.




But if you're as lazy as me, perhaps the best option would be to use
scsh.  You get a shell, but it's really a scheme, and there is already
all you need to edit scheme scripts, and C-x C-e already works.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

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