xonsh : python-ish BASHward looking shell

Getting started

Easiest way to get started on Mac is :

brew install xonsh

This installed older version than one released. It was good to try xonsh for the first time. But the documentation was newer than the software (imagine that) So I removed it.

But in the process it installed python 3.5.1 (as a dependency) I still have python 3.4.2 from earlier brew installation, but now it was “orphan”

Problem

Now that I had python 3.5.1. as my default python, it caused a bit of problem, (it felt like a big problem in the beginning) since lot of stuff that was installed on 3.4 was not available anymore.

Main problem was virtualenvwrapper - which had references in my .zshrc but “new” python site packages did not have it installed.

So I had to

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    pip3 install virtualenv
    pip3 install virtualenvwrapper

Now virtualenvwrapper errors went away.

Getting started .. again

Since brew had older version, I decided to use pip instead

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    pip3 install xonsh
    $ xonsh --version
    xonsh/0.4.4

Next step was configuring xonsh via the wizard.

When I had run xonfig wizard earlier, I had selected a few of the xontribs but they were not installed, so when I started xonsh I got ImportWarning

It would be good if the wizard offered only the xontribs that are available, better still, offer to invoke pip to install the missing xontribs that user has selected to use. Off course, xonsh team is aware of this.

Anyway, way to install these are via pip.

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    pip3 install xonsh-autoxsh
    pip3 install xontrib-avox
    pip3 install xontrib-prompt-ret-code

Better Prompt

Default toolkit (Is that the right term?) used by xonsh is gnureadlines but the alternative is way superior.

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    pip3 install prompt_toolkit

Now my prompt was pimped “up” - nice auto-completions like fish (I forgot to mention that I had brew install bash-completion earlier) But I got an error that pygments was missing, so

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    pip3 install pygments

Now all is well :)

Some tips

Colour Style

Now that I got a nicer shell, ensure that you set the color style of your choice.

xonfig styles will all the “themes” available.

I started with monokai since I use it elsewhere as well. But trying new theme is as simple as changing the variable name is running xonsh shell !!!!

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   $XONSH_COLOR_STYLE='native'

Environment Variables

If you have seen the pycon 2016 video, about xonsh or read the documentation throughly you probably know about ${...}

This command lists all the environment variables

For useful environment variables, see http://xon.sh/envvars.html

History

The documentation boasts of rich history, but I had problem related to history command not working

In the process, I upgraded to version 0.4.5 where there were several history related fixes/improvements. But the problem did not go away. But there is a workaround. See the details and the workaround here

See update ¹.

Concluding thoughts

I am still not ready to make xonsh my default shell (yet) There are certain problems that prevent me from switching, but out of (say) 10 terminal tabs I have open, at least 8 are running xonsh - That is not bad :)

I encourage you to try xonsh especially if you are python developer. I'm sure you will not be disappointed.