[RFC] Shells, there are so many

[michaelblyons]

The ShellScript package has basically evolved into Bash (and is now fairly explicit about being Bash). People are using the Bash-centric highlighting for their sh, Zsh, Fish, etc. files as well, and it sometimes leads to mishighlighting.

What should be done? Here are some broad options:

Leave it as-is

This has the nice feature of being simple. Anyone can make or install a third-party package that specifically matches their shell's syntax.

Add other shells here

Pros: ST ships with more stuff.
Cons: maintenance, update cycle, making the thing in the first place, duplication of work.

Add other shells here as inherited files

I imagine this as a POSIX.sublime-syntax that Bash and other shells can inject into or tinker with.

Pros: ST ships with more stuff. Less duplication of work than independent files.
Cons: maintenance, update cycle, now the Shells are interdependent and changes are harder to make without breaking something else.

[deathaxe]

We have inheritance. It should be quite simple to handle smaller differences like those between bash and zsh.

I don't have any overview about the shell specific details though. I am not quite sure which implementations in Bash were made tolerant to work with ZSH or other shell dialects.

I am not quite sure which ones are special for Bash only.

If we want to create different dialects, we should have a base syntax which contains common rules, which Bash, ZSH, ... can make use of by inerhitance. Not sure if POSIX.sublime-syntax would be the name of choise or something generic like Shell (Plain).sublime-syntax or Shell (Basic).sublime-syntax.

Not sure where to put the cryptic long Shell-Unix-Generic to in that context. It is a synonym for Bash atm and is used by Makefile.

In short: Can bash be renamed to "Shell (Basic)" with source.shell and creating a derived empty Bash.sublime-syntax as synonym or where to start?

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I think we should handle simple to handle dialects in this repo to have them out of the box and keep them together. I am still a bit concerned about possible dependencies created by inheritance. If too many 3rd-party packages extend syntaxes of this repo it will become hard/impossible to make bigger changes (renaming contexts) without breaking them. Thus we should try to keep things together.

I am not sure about Fish though. With a bird's eye on its homepage syntax seems quite different. Not sure if that can be handled with overriding 2 or 3 contexts only.

Not aware of all the other's though.

[wbond]

A possibly useful reference: https://hyperpolyglot.org/unix-shells

[deathaxe]

Probably useful to choose/find POSIX compatible common language features to be commonly supported by all shells.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/contents.html

[michaelblyons]

I think this is closed by #4024