The Python Podcast.__init__ - Anthony Scopatz on Xonsh

Oct 30 2015 57 mins 2

Other Episodes

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list.

Summary

Anthony Scopatz is the creator of the Python shell Xonsh in addition to his work as a professor of nuclear physics. In this episode we talked to him about why he created Xonsh, how it works, and what his goals are for the project. It is definitely worth trying out Xonsh as it greatly simplifies the day-to-day use of your terminal environment by adding easily accessible python interoperability.

Brief Introduction

Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.

Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS

Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+

I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com

I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.

Linode is also sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project

We are recording today on October 12th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti

Today we are interviewing Anthony Scopatz about Xonsh

On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job.

Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up!

Interview with Anthony Scopatz

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

Can you explain what Xonsh is and your motivation for creating it?

For people transitioning to Xonsh from a shell like Bash or Zsh, what are some of the biggest differences that they will see?

What are some really powerful one-liners that showcase Xonsh’s capabilities?

What is it about Python that lends itself to this kind of a project and what are your thoughts on building something like Xonsh in another language such as Ruby or Node.js?

If you had to single out one killer feature that Xonsh brings to the table, what would that be?

Is it possible to specify which shell, such as bash or zsh, gets used in subprocess mode?

I started using the Xonsh shell as my daily terminal recently and have been enjoying it so far. One of the things that I have been wondering is how to hook into the completion system to provide eldoc style completion from parsing the output of help flags. Do you have any advice on where to start? Perhaps using the docopt library to handle parsing of help output and generate completions from that?

What are your thoughts on adding a section to the project documentation for people to list various extension modules that people can take advantage of? Or perhaps creating something along the lines of Oh my Xonsh?

How do bash function definitions interoperate with the Xonsh environment and functions defined in Python?

It seems as though there could be some potential path or compatibility issues when moving between virtual environments and having access to extension modules loaded into Xonsh. Can you shed some light on that?