Show HN: Whetuu – a zero-config cross-shell prompt written in Zig (yamafaktory.github.io)
36 points by yamafaktory 5 hours ago
drdexebtjl 2 hours ago
I don’t want my prompt to also handle shell history, and especially in such an “opinionated” way.
What happens to my actual shell-provided history?
Does too much for me.
edit:
> Both files follow the XDG base directory spec, so neither lives in the install directory. Removing whetuu with rm -rf ~/.whetuu cannot take your history with it. whetuu paths prints both locations.
Please stop creating directories in my $HOME.
reddit_clone an hour ago
I do want shell history with folders.
I tried a few (Atuin? McFly?) but the performance wasn't good with my massive zsh history (going back several years).
Zsh+fzf does a buttery smooth job (no folders though, unfortunately). Other tools start to stutter at scale.
drdexebtjl an hour ago
Yeah, I do too. From a shell history tool. Not from a shell prompt.
yamafaktory 2 hours ago
Why not, plenty of tools - atuin included - are doing that.
drdexebtjl 2 hours ago
No, they are not? Atuin is not a shell prompt, you can use it with any prompt. Like Starship, Spaceship, liquidprompt, etc. None of those hijack shell history.
yamafaktory an hour ago
linsomniac 2 hours ago
Unclear to me: does this also do shell history? I'm using atuin and not interested in changing that. I did just switch over to oh-my-posh a few weeks ago and it's good, but I would be open to trying something else to compare, particularly since I have some directories with monorepos where oh-my-posh goes out to lunch for a couple seconds. Also oh-my-posh sometimes loses its mind and switches back to the default prompt rather than my customized one.
I'm on the fence about my current "2-line prompt, collapsing to a single line" when I press enter. I like that it gives me a lot of room, but there's some information I find I'm wishing was persisted in my shell history (git branch, previous command execution time for long running commands).
minraws 4 hours ago
I didn't quite gel with it, seemed overly, well opinionated for no meaningful performance or otherwise improvement to any other simple prompt.
lfx 3 hours ago
This is awesome -
*A history picker on the up arrow*
*Commands are recorded once they finish, and only when they exited cleanly, so typos never clutter the list.*
Where the history is stored? Is it possible to store in single place like user root dir?*
seanhunter 3 hours ago
Does that mean you can't go up and fix a typo? If so, that sounds strictly worse than what you get by default from the shell (which is up arrow, ctrl-r and various other methods of history searching, and history substitution or editing to fix errors).
yamafaktory an hour ago
I fixed it - you can go up and edit the last failing one. As soon as another cmd succeeds, it will not longer appear in the list and it's never stored into the tool history.
yamafaktory 3 hours ago
Thanks for the feedback! You can run `whetuu paths` and will get that, I'll fix the readme.
dfee 2 hours ago
> Pronounced FEH-too (/ˈfɛ.tuː/). Stress the first syllable. In Māori wh is an f sound, not a w. The macron in ū makes that vowel long, which is why the ASCII spelling doubles it.
oof. deliberate choice?
yamafaktory 2 hours ago
You're right. Whetuu is actually correct in ASCII. I did study study some Te reo Māori a while ago. Will fix.
yamafaktory 40 minutes ago
Fixed :)
Fervicus an hour ago
It used to be the case that seeing cool Show HN projects would get me excited. Ever since the advent of agentic coding, that has been completely lost for me. 9/10 times now they are just claude produced slop with a 3 day long commit history. Quite sad.
kedislav 4 hours ago
please stop piping into bash or sh. force people to use the editor, read the install script, and tell them how to run it
GuB-42 3 hours ago
"curl | sh" certainly feels wrong, but in the end, even if you download and read the script before running commands, let's be real: you are going to run a binary that you didn't inspect.
Not saying you shouldn't check your scripts, I usually do, I like to know where the files are going in case the installer messes up, but the risks tend to be overstated compared to running the executable itself.
moondev 2 hours ago
What if this project offered binaries from GitHub releases instead? How do you read those?
It's more realistic to decide if you trust the source, GitHub user yamafaktory in this case. Then you can ensure that your method of download uses TLS.
yamafaktory an hour ago
It already does. The releases page has prebuilt binaries for four targets plus a SHA256SUMS file. You can download the tarball straight from GitHub over TLS, verify it against the checksums, and run it. No script involved.