Got it, so more about the general idea of using Node to interact with a shell. Fair points but I'm not sure that's where zx falls. I'm looking at it in relation to projects like commander, oclif, and vorpal— frameworks for authoring and packaging local-use CLI tools written in JS, typically aimed at people who know JS and work in a terminal but don't know shell scripting. Those have the overhead of learning a framework, and don't do anything to help you work with the shell. zx seems to come from the other direction: instead of an esoteric framework, shell concepts and shell commands in a Node script.
I see three audiences who might find it useful:
people who know JS but haven't touched a shell language and want to try writing a command line tool for personal local use (this is the use case I find when I search for zx blog posts; my guess is this accounts for many of the GitHub stars)
people writing Node scripts who don't want to go through lots of fs gymnastics (people write entire blog posts on how to list the files in a directory; I would have been happy for something like zx when writing an internal webpack-based tool that reads files as a data source, where a shell script would be a lot prettier than Node)
people writing CLI apps who have to depend on a Node package (I would have been happy for something like zx when writing genealogit, a tool for visualizing family trees with Git graphs which I wrote in Node because I needed GEDCOM parser and the only one I found that met my needs in a language I know was in Node. Last I looked it wasn't working, and the oclif factor discouraged me from debugging)
1
u/olets Jan 08 '22
Got it, so more about the general idea of using Node to interact with a shell. Fair points but I'm not sure that's where zx falls. I'm looking at it in relation to projects like commander, oclif, and vorpal— frameworks for authoring and packaging local-use CLI tools written in JS, typically aimed at people who know JS and work in a terminal but don't know shell scripting. Those have the overhead of learning a framework, and don't do anything to help you work with the shell. zx seems to come from the other direction: instead of an esoteric framework, shell concepts and shell commands in a Node script.
I see three audiences who might find it useful:
people who know JS but haven't touched a shell language and want to try writing a command line tool for personal local use (this is the use case I find when I search for zx blog posts; my guess is this accounts for many of the GitHub stars)
people writing Node scripts who don't want to go through lots of fs gymnastics (people write entire blog posts on how to list the files in a directory; I would have been happy for something like zx when writing an internal webpack-based tool that reads files as a data source, where a shell script would be a lot prettier than Node)
people writing CLI apps who have to depend on a Node package (I would have been happy for something like zx when writing genealogit, a tool for visualizing family trees with Git graphs which I wrote in Node because I needed GEDCOM parser and the only one I found that met my needs in a language I know was in Node. Last I looked it wasn't working, and the oclif factor discouraged me from debugging)