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-id: 'idea--thule-alternatives'
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-content: |
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- The big alternative I know of is
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- [TermKit](https://github.com/unconed/TermKit), which is an interesting
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- experiment: but, to me, it's filled with far too many special cases
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- and not enough nice primitives. For example, there's a special
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- way of outputting a list of files (e.g. output from `ls`) but this
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- isn't because "files" are necessarily a distinct thing, but because
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- there's a special type of output for `ls`-like commands (in this
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- case, `application/json; schema=termkit.files`, which corresponds
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- to a list of filenames.)
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-
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- Thule builds on top of this by having a standard set of building
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- blocks, so that you no longer have the special-case "list of files",
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- but rather primitive building blocks like `list` and `file`.
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- Consider the output from `wc`: this also contains file references,
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- but it additionally contains a table mapping those to values. In
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- a TermKit-like setting, you'd have to come up with a new schema
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- (say, `application/json; schema=termkit.wordcount`) that understands
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- which parts of the output are files and which aren't. This is
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- particularly tricky for `wc`, because you want to have the
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- final `total` row, which does _not_ contain a file. And what if
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- other tools also print table-like structures? Can those be
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- processed with the same tools?
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-
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- Thule aims to pull those low-level building blocks out, so the
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- output from `ls` might give you a collection like
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-
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- (set (file "/tmp/foo.txt") (file "/tmp/bar.c"))
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-
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- and the output from `wc` will give you
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-
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- (table ((text "lines") (text "words") (text "characters") (text "file"))
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- ((int 10) (int 30) (int 300) (file "/tmp/foo.txt"))
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- ((int 20) (int 60) (int 900) (file "/tmp/bar.c"))
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- ((int 30) (int 90) (int 1200) (text "total")))
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-
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- rather the structure of the collections would be a hint to the
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- shell on how to display them in a rich way.
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-related:
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- - name: idea--thule
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- why: The high-level idea
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