Shifu

Details

External ID

47573661

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

Shifu

Website domain

github.com

Launched

March 30, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

7

Upvotes percentile

0.4108241082410824

Tags

—

Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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 them is mostly unnecessary, many might even discourage it for many valid reasons.Nonetheless, I considered writing this functionality myself, but that felt like a poor use of company time. So I started toying with what a framework to handle those concerns entirely in shell script would look like on the side. Thus, shifu was born. I've been working on it off and on for about a year, and think I've got a reasonable alpha release, so thought I'd share.

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