
Powerlisp: Common Lisp tool for automating tasks for Unix power-users - _emacsomancer_
https://github.com/luksamuk/powerlisp
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jdormit
I read the whole README and I still have no idea what this does. Something
about bookmarking websites and searches in some sort of configurable menu?

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4lch3m1st
Hello, I'm the author. I just found out someone put this in HN again, I hope I
can explain.

This is basically a way to create menus and submenus for recurrent utilities.
You can use a rofi or dmenu frontend. Once you bind it a key shortcut,
rofi/dmenu will come up asking you what to do.

Right now I can directly access my favorite websites, open my favorite
programs, do web search (and also switch web engine), all without touching the
browser directly. The idea is to group a lot of things in a lightweight
script, and have a keyboard-only interaction with no extra extensions or
programs.

I agree that the README is a little poor right now, and screenshots/gifs would
also help on this regard. I'll start working on it pretty soon.

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nerdponx
Maybe "rofi/dmenu scripting and configuration layer written in Common Lisp"
might be an appropriate tagline?

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jolmg
Right. With the current title my first impression was that it was like a Unix
shell with Common Lisp somehow as the shell language. I mean the shell _is_
the tool Unix power-users mostly use to automate tasks.

It might be a good idea to add screenshots or a gif or something to the
README, and I see they've realized that.

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Communitivity
I like this idea as the foundation of a Lisp-based shell. I'd like to see an
plugin API, and package mechanism, similar to MELPA for Emacs. Users could
write scripts and publish them as a signed package, then users could install
them.

I'd also love to see terminal Emacs as the default shell editor for this
shell.

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thelopa
“Lisp-based shell” is so overdone. The hot new thing is merging Common Lisp
and POSIX shell into a single, monstrous language!

[https://github.com/bradleyjensen/shcl](https://github.com/bradleyjensen/shcl)

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chubot
FWIW I have a list of similar ideas done in essentially every language,
including every popular Lisp variant:

[https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources#inter...](https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources#internal-
shell-dsls-in-various-languages)

~~~
thelopa
That’s really cool! I got more than a few new ideas for SHCL by browsing
through that list. Thanks for sharing!

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sjatkins
It isn't lisp but I have used xonsh which is a python shell. It has a lot of
nice uses and it is much easier to right python that can interact with normal
shell commands well including capturing their outputs than is to write actual
bash or whatever scripts. And being able to create these things in a solid
repl is very nice.

In general I have dreamed for ages of one language could enough to do
everything I want to do with a computer. And I am pretty imaginative as to
what is in that set.

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eschaton
There’s already a PowerLisp, it’s the original version of Corman Lisp for
Macintosh.

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swalsh
This sounds really interesting to me, I have a bunch of items I can think of
where this might be useful to automate (for example, my wife and I have
different bank accounts, but share a credit card for points reasons... givng
my wife a statement is really hard since they "upgraded" their site, and
removed the transactions export feature).

But I'm not sure where to start automating this. It would be great to have
some examples.

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4lch3m1st
In that case, you might want to check the wiki. There are still some examples
missing, but they'll give you a general idea.

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_emacsomancer_
Another nice tool (written in Haskell rather than Lisp in this case) is
Greenclip, which integrates a clipboard into rodi/dmenu:
[https://github.com/erebe/greenclip](https://github.com/erebe/greenclip)

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mtreis86
Any examples of it in use?

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equalunique
Looks like it's time to create a Guix for BSD systems.

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ZeRoo
I really would like to see this in future, especially for OpenBSD

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heinrichhartman
Which operating systems are supported? Don't see that in the Readme.

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4lch3m1st
Hello. It was tested on Linux and FreeBSD. Works fine on any of those systems
if you have SBCL and dmenu installed, though it might need a few tweaks on
program paths of your configuration file.

I plan to migrate this to a more flexible Roswell script in a near future.

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unixhero
Like OSX' automator?

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1-6
Workflow languages are in vogue this morning, huh?

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submeta
I know that Lisp is very popular here on HN (Paul Graham!), but my gut feeling
tells me that many Lisp related posts with hardly any upvotes / comments get
pushed to the front page of HN. I wish there was a HN filter to hide certain
keywords.

NB: I read SICP cover to cover twenty years ago, did many private projects
with DrScheme (Racket) and was influenced by it's paradigms early on. I do
appreciate Lispy topics, but why front page of HN?

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Jtsummers
You can hide individual posts, which I find useful for a lot of non-technical
content that's less interesting to me. It's manual, but it gets them off the
home page and you can see content from the 2nd/3rd pages of material that may
be of more interest to you.

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submeta
Appreciate your help. - Actually that's what I do. Hide manually.

