Ergonomica with Liam Schumm

Summary

As developers we spend a lot of our work day in a terminal window, using shells that were designed 30 years ago. This week Liam Schumm joins me to explain why he decided to write a new, more ergonomic shell environment to simplify his workflow.

Preface

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Liam Schumm about Ergonomica

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• What is Ergonomica and what was your reason for creating it?
• What are some of the most difficult aspects of the project that you have experienced?
• How is Ergonomica implemented?
• What was your reason for using a dialect of Lisp as the interface for a terminal environment as opposed to iterating on the idioms in shells such as Bash?
• How does Ergonomica’s implementation differ from traditional shells such as Bash, Csh, and Powershell?
• How does Ergonomica’s implementation differ from other alternative shells such as Xonsh, ZSH, and Fish?
• Why did you choose to implement Ergonomica in Python?
• What’s your target group for Ergonomica?
• What do you have planned for the future of Ergonomica?
• Reading through your website you are fairly well accomplished. How does your age factor into the kinds of projects that you are engaged in?

Keep In Touch

• Liam’s GitHub
• Email
• @liamschumm on Twitter

Picks

• Tobias
  • Magic The Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalkers



• Liam
  • GitLab CE
  • Python-prompt-toolkit
  • Thriftbooks – 15% off your first order

Links

• PyGame
• Minecraft
• Beeware
• ChiPy
• Chi Hack Night
• XKCD Tar Comic
• POSIX
• Colorama
• PLY
• Peter Norvig
• How to write a lisp interpreter in python
• ZSH
• Fish
• Xonsh
• PyVim
• sh
• Homebrew

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA