Oh My Zsh is quite poplar ecosystem allows people to run useful scenarios to customize their terminals as well to deal with typical tasks.

A couple years ago I created the Tomtit and since then this has been bothering me - how similar it is to what ohmyzsh does ...

Well, not exactly, but it's written on Raku.

Brief comparison with ohmyzsh

• Tomit allows to write portable scripts and execute them to satisfy users' needs. The same what ohmyzsh plugins do

• Unlike ohmyzsh plugins which are written on Zshell, Tomtit plugins could be written on similar Bash or many other languages supported by Sparrow ( on which the Tomtit is built on )

• Unlike ohmyzsh scenarios, Tomtit scenarios get run as Raku scripts and thus are highly customizable. In ohmyzsh you only have shell aliases or functions

• Ohmyzh has 275+ plugins which is a little bit more then Sparrow has - 216 plugins, however the difference is not that big, considering that the only Sparrow maintainer is me :-).

Brief example

Every time I work with git I need this helpers that easy my work. With Tomtit I'd do this:

tom --profile git

output:

install git@commit ...
install git@git-branch-delete ...
install git@git-publish ...
install git@git-summary ...
install git@pull ...
install git@push ...
install git@set-git ...
install git@status ...
install git@update-branch-list ...

And then set-up my git config for this project:

tom --edit set-git

#!raku

task-run "set git", "git-base", %(
  email => 'melezhik@email.com',
  name  => 'Alexey Melezhik',
  config_scope => 'local',
  set_credential_cache => 'on'
);

And apply it:

tom set-git

output:

[repository] :: index updated from file:///root/repo/api/v1/index
[set git] :: git credential.helper cache --timeout=3000000
[set git] :: git user.email melezhik@email.com
[set git] :: git user.name Alexey Melezhik
[task check] stdout match <git user.email melezhik@email.com> True
[task check] stdout match <git user.name Alexey Melezhik> True

That is it!

Now I only need to commit my configuration into git:

echo ".cache" >> .gitignore
git add .tom
git commit -a -m "my tomtit helpers for git"
git push

Tomtit profiles

Tomtit profiles are predefined user scripts grouped by categories:

tom --profile

output:

ado
azure
git
gitlab
hello
perl
raku
ruby
yaml

When you install a profile you install all scripts into .tom directory. For example, as we did for git:

tom --profile --list git

output:

[profile scenarios]
git@commit      installed: True
git@git-branch-delete   installed: True
git@git-publish installed: True
git@git-summary installed: True
git@pull        installed: True
git@push        installed: True
git@set-git     installed: True
git@status      installed: True
git@update-branch-list  installed: True

We've ended up having several git-* scripts in .tom directory.

Profile scripts are just Raku scripts invoking one or more Sparrow plugins. That's it. Tomtit would generate some reasonable stubs for .tom/ Raku scripts but you are always free to edit the ones.

For example as we did for set-git:

tom --edit set-git

It allows you to generate some boilerplate code but then modify it upon your needs.

Conclusion

Tomtit and Sparrow could be a reasonable alternative to ohmyzsh with pros mentioned above. Of course, some things like exporting shell aliases won't work with in Tomtit ( but there is workaround for that), however other command line tasks could be executed via Tomtit in very efficient way.

I am looking for new (Raku?) contributors for the project.

And thank you for reading.

Alexey.