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