Shell
In Athena OS, four shells are mainly used: Bash, Fish, Zsh and PowerShell. For Bash, Fish, Zsh the same prompt pattern has been used.
At installation time, the user can choose between Bash, Fish and Zsh. However, Bash and PowerShell are installed by default.
Bash
Bash (Bourne-again Shell) is a command-line shell/programming language by the GNU Project. Bash is the default command-line shell on Athena OS. Here, Bash implements autosuggestion and autocompletion features in order to increase the user experience.
Generally, Bash is not able to retrieve the new configuration on .bashrc automatically. For example, if the shell prompt changes due to a command, this change is not applied on the current shell session. Athena solved this, by adding the following line on .bashrc:
export PROMPT_COMMAND='source ~/.bashrc no-repeat-flag'Fish
Fish (Friendly interactive shell), is a command-line shell intended to be interactive and user-friendly. Fish is intentionally not fully POSIX compliant, it aims at addressing POSIX inconsistencies with a simplified or a different syntax.
The implementation of Fish shell has been decided according to some characteristics as:
- Extensive UI: syntax highlighting, autosuggestion, tab completion and selection lists that can be navigated and filtered.
- No configuration needed: Fish is designed to be ready to use immediately, without requiring extensive configuration.
- Easy scripting: new functions can be added on the fly. The syntax is easy to learn and use.
Since Fish and Bash use different statements, at the beginning of the session, the user is associated with Bash because several bash scripts must be sourced at the login (i.e., /etc/profile.d/ scripts). When the user opens a terminal, .bashrc is sourced for setting configuration and variables and at the end it executes FISH.
Finally, for keeping FISH as shell even if in the terminal we open new tabs and preventing that it switches to BASH, the following code has been added at the end of .bashrc and delete each alias ps in your .bashrc or .bash_aliases file for avoding conflicting errors:
[[ $(ps --no-header --pid=$PPID --format=comm) != "${SHELL#/usr/bin/}" && -z ${BASH_EXECUTION_STRING} && ${SHELL} != "/usr/bin/bash" ]] && exec $SHELLZsh
Zsh is a powerful shell that operates as both an interactive shell and as a scripting language interpreter. While being compatible with the POSIX sh (not by default, only if issuing emulate sh), it offers advantages such as improved tab completion and globbing.
In general, Zsh is not able to retrieve the new configuration on .zshrc automatically. For example, if the shell prompt changes due to a command, this change is not applied on the current shell session. For solving this, on .zshrc the following lines have been added:
precmd() { eval "$PROMPT_COMMAND" }export PROMPT_COMMAND='source ~/.zshrc no-repeat-flag'In Athena OS, Zsh implements autosuggestion, globbing and autocompletion features in order to increase the user experience.
PowerShell
PowerShell is a cross-platform task automation solution made up of a command-line shell, a scripting language, and a configuration management framework.
In Athena OS, PowerShell has been implemented by adding a lot of useful modules that can improve the efficiency of the user activity.
Aliases
On Bash, Fish and Zsh are set several shells defined in ~/.bash_aliases. They can vary between Athena Arch and Athena Nix. The most useful aliases are:
| Keybind | Description | Athena Arch | Athena Nix |
|---|---|---|---|
| anycommand | tb | Generate a link to a webpage containing the output of the piped command. | X | X |
| cleanup | Cleanup orphaned packages. | X | X |
| cpc filename.txt | Copy the content of a file in clipboard. | X | X |
| hw | Show hardware info. | X | X |
| iso | Show ISO release and version information used to install the system. | X | X |
| jctl | Get the error messages from journalctl. | X | X |
| journalctl-upload | Generate a link to a webpage containing the output of journalctl for troubleshooting purpose. | X | X |
| lockreset | Unlock the user account due to multiple failed sudo attempts. | X | X |
| nb | Edit ~/.bashrc by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| nconfgrub | Edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| nf | Edit ~/.config/fish/config.fish by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| nfstab | Edit /etc/fstab by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| ngrub | Edit /etc/default/grub by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| nhosts | Edit /etc/hosts by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| nmkinitcpio | Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| npacman | Edit /etc/pacman.conf by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | |
| nz | Edit ~/.zshrc by the EDITOR defined in ~/.bashrc. | X | X |
| openports | Show open ports. | X | X |
| psa | Show a detailed list of all processes. | X | X |
| pyserver | Initiate a HTTP server instance on the current directory on port 8000. | X | X |
| sr | Reboot the system. | X | X |
| ssn | Shutdown now. | X | X |
| unlock | Remove the packmane lock file /var/lib/pacman/db.lck. | X | |
| update | Run pacman package update. | X | |
| update-fc | Update the font cache when a new font is added. | X | X |
| update-grub | Update the GRUB. | X | X |