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Quick Start

This guide gets you running cjsh, a POSIX-based interactive shell with integrated modern features, as quickly as possible.

Prerequisites

A standard C/C++ Compiler:

  • GCC
  • clang

And CMake 3.25 or newer.

And that is it! cjsh has no external dependencies and was designed like this for pure simplicity. To just work where ever.

Installation

cjsh can be downloaded or built in multiple different ways.

As a package

cjsh is available through multiple package managers:

Homebrew (macOS/Linux)

    brew tap CadenFinley/tap
    brew install cjsh

Arch Linux (AUR)

    # Using yay
    yay -S cjsh

    # Using paru
    paru -S cjsh

    # Or manually
    git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/cjsh.git
    cd cjsh
    makepkg -si

Hopefully more package managers to come as cjsh gets bigger.

Manual building and installation

cjsh is super easy to download and install. Everything is hosted on the github repo at: https://github.com/CadenFinley/CJsShell

The master branch holds the most recent commits and may not always be stable and may have breaking changes with no backwards compatibility. For the most stable release, stick to using the latest tagged release from the public GitHub releases.

cjsh is still in active, rapid development so even the latest release can still have breaking changes with no backwards compatibilities, although they will always be noted in the release if they exist.

    # First clone the repo
    git clone https://github.com/CadenFinley/CJsShell && cd CJsShell

    # Configure a Release build (outputs to ./build)
    cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

    # Compile using all available cores
    cmake --build build --config Release --parallel

After building, the cjsh executable will be in the build/ directory. You can run it directly with ./build/cjsh

Build info

By default the commands above produce an optimized Release build.

  • Pass -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug to build with sanitizers and full debug info.
  • Pass -DCJSH_MINIMAL_BUILD=ON for the ultra-small binary profile.
  • cmake --build build --target clean removes the build artifacts.
  • Disable compile database emission with -DCJSH_GENERATE_COMPILE_COMMANDS=OFF if your tooling does not need it.
  • Install the binary anywhere with cmake --install build --config Release --prefix ~/.local (adjust the prefix as desired).
  • Export CJSH_STRIP_BINARY=0 before configuring to keep symbols in non-Debug builds.

As before, git revision information is embedded automatically; use CJSH_GIT_HASH_OVERRIDE if you need to pin a custom value.

Next Steps

Now that you have cjsh installed, check out What You Need to Know to learn about all the powerful features available out of the box and how to configure them to suit your workflow.