Alternatives
Products that do what Jitzu – My PowerShell Killer does
Born out of my frustration with powershell’s slow startup and confusing syntax I have long wanted to build a shell and scripting language in .NET. I have been working on it for a long time and thanks to Claude, I was able to finally get it over the line. I daily drive it as my shell on Windows, and really happy with it so far. Please try it and let me know where it can improve!
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Hi HN! Silk is a project I began working on approximately six months ago without any prior experience or knowledge of compiler design, and it's been a frustrating but fun learning experience. It is very much a work in progress, but I would love to hear feedback of any kind!
2020 · ajaymt.github.io
- 3MP
I got a bit carried away writing an editor so I could draw some pixel art for starting my blog and ended up with some pwsh spaghetti that's quite fun to use.
2022 · shaunlawrie.com
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I had some fun learning to parse PowerShell code with the built-in abstract syntax tree for this one. I originally wrote it to add some color to the output in PowerShellAI.
2023 · github.com
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Kosh is a Bash-compatible runtime focused on VERY detailed diagnostics and performance. The project started from frustration with how difficult shell errors can be to debug. And how slow some tools are. The project is feature-complete and the core is usable enough to experiment with. There is a Language Server that works on shell scrips, but I'm planning to expand it to support every conf/YAML/etc file that may have Bash embedded in, e.g. GitHub workflows. Report: bash incompatibility, broken diagnostics, cases where existing tools may solve the problem better Thanks!
8d ago · github.com
- 6SA
The startup I work for has an internal, bash-based, cli that basically amounts to shared aliases with a common entrypoint. As the number of aliases has grown, I've had a desire to group functionality together in subcommands, add more help strings, and have better tab completion. I know I could convert it to, e.g., a python script, but I was curious what was possible if we continued to use bash. I couldn't find anything that solved those problems without lots of extra machinery. I understand why, shell scripts are generally not long, and focused on a dedicated task; adding cli features to…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 7IB
As a software engineer, my reflex has always been to script everything I can. Scripting is easy, but everything around it is tricky: scripts have to run somewhere, they need access to credentials, they need to be monitored. None of it is simple. No-code automation platforms such as Zapier or IFTTT are too restrictive for technical tasks; CI/CD platforms make it easy to script tasks related to a repository, but are limited when trying to do anything else. I wanted the low level control you have when writing scripts while retaining the comfort of a platform managing execution for me. So I…
2022 · exograd.com
- 8SB
Hi HN! I built a CLI tool called ShellTalk for macOS, Linux, and web (WebAssembly) that maps English text to the corresponding Bash commands. ShellTalk is written in Swift and available under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. I was inspired a few weeks ago after reading the Meta-Harness paper and seeing a tool called Hunch that did something similar using the Apple Foundation model. I often forget flag names and orders, but I wanted something that worked consistently. The 3B AFM worked surprisingly well with Hunch, but it felt slow and sometimes slight changes in what I wrote would result in…
Apr 2026 · barrasso.me
- 9CC
Yesterday, I found myself writing a little C throwaway script to test something out. That happens often enough to clutter my HOME and some other directories with these useless text files and binaries. So I thought that I can use a repl instead. Quick google search didn't find any good and tested solutions. So I wrote my own with help of a tcc compiler. Why POSIX Shell? Because it would be far too easy in a normal language (it'd probably take me ~10 minutes to rewrite this in Nim) and where is fun in that?
May 2026 · codeberg.org
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It's quite limited but does the job, I invite anybody not aware of what cram tests are to give them a try, being on Unix with the original cram or Windows with this one ;)
Nov 2025 · github.com
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Sep 2025 · github.com
- 12SA
I’ve been working on shuck, a shell script linter written in Rust. ShellCheck is excellent project and set the bar for this space. However, it's very slow and take up a far amount of resources. shuck is conservatively 20x faster than shellcheck and uses a fraction of the resources. shuck currently supports sh, bash, dash, ksh, mksh, and zsh. shuck should mostly be a drop in replacement for shellcheck but it is not a port since shellcheck is GPL. It is s clean-room implementation with its own parser and analysis engine, so behavior may differ in some cases. shuck is tested against shellcheck…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Hola HN! Long time lurker, sometimes commentor, first time poster here. I’ve been working alongside my two co-founders and a few colleagues on a project I’m excited (and a little nervous) to share with you all! Like many of us, I’ve lived a tortured existence with AI coding (is it vibes?) over the past few months - I think November was a big moment with this. But, one thing I’ve noticed after building orchestration layer after orchestration layer is that the thing I always came back to was “what the hell is Claude Code actually doing?” Perhaps it’s because of the time Claude Code got…
Jun 2026 · backplanes.com
- 14LM
This is my side project for the past few months. I started it because I just learned about functional programming and at the same time want to write something cool in C. Web playground: https://leonw774.github.io/lreng
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN. This is a script I have been using for some time for coding tasks, which I have polished a bit and published. The motivation behind this script was to have an agent with persistent session which I can use from the shell like a regular command. It _can_ also be scripted, although I don't use it in such a way. The script uses a minimal prompt, which just tells it to use standard unix tools to do everything. I was surprised at how well it worked, when using a good model. Qwen3-coder is on openrouter, and it works well with the minimal instructions. I also tested qwen2.5-coder with ollama…
2025 · github.com
- 16IB
Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…
2024 · minitap.io
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With coding agents now allowing for lots of small projects and products running in tandem, and as they tend to grow in operational complexity, I've been finding myself wanting a way to manage a bunch of running npm/bun servers as well as one-off operational jobs I need to run. I also want to keep my terminal focused on git and claude, and have my servers somewhere else. Nemo solves that problem: I can now more efficiently manage and view local servers and jobs, look at their logs and see their CPU/RAM metrics as well. My terminal windows are now much more tidy and focused. It's not…
May 2026 · github.com
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I have been coding over four decades, in many languages, on many projects (including Firefox, Final Cut Pro, the Newton, and Fullwrite Professional if you can remember that far back; all these using my "dead-name"). I wrote something small and simple to scratch an itch. It's the UNIX philosophy: small "one-trick ponies", each *really* good at their one trick, then the user can hook them together to solve actual problems. I'm a CLI guy, and for almost everything, I already have this. But not for debugging. The itch I scratched was the connector that enables this philosophy for debugging. That…
Jun 2026
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Hello! This ebook aims to teach Linux command line tools and Shell Scripting for beginner to intermediate level users. The main focus is towards managing your files and performing text processing tasks. Includes plenty of examples, exercises (200+) and solutions. To celebrate my latest ebook release, you can download PDF/EPUB versions of Computing from the Command Line for FREE till 08-Nov-2022: https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_computing (the web version linked as the post url is always free) All books bundle (all my 13 programming ebooks) is $10 (normal…
2022 · learnbyexample.github.io
- 20GS
I've worked on several projects writing and implementing specifications (particularly CLN): I've found the specs I write are much better when I quote them in the implementation, so I can see what implementers need to know. Also, when specs change in development, it's almost trivial to find where to update the code. This project is a formalization of my various hacky scripts which ensure the requirements are accurately quoted, and give coverage if any are missing. Not a major Opus, but I hope someone else finds it useful!
Jul 2026 · greatspectations.org
- 21SO
Hello all, I found myself rewriting the same shell scripts to distribute my binaries over and again, so I decided to put them in a repository and serve them with a prettier URL - to have nicer READMEs for my projects. I'll add some other tasks like installing/uninstalling on Windows, but in general ideas are welcome. Maybe somebody else finds them useful!
2023 · github.com
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