Keeping expectations grounded, but my little hobby project just made it onto the awesome-zsh-plugins list.
Posted by ClassroomHaunting333@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 4 comments
Thought I would share a small personal milestone with the community. Hope you don't mind.
A hobby project of mine called Mend was recently accepted into the awesome-zsh-plugins list.
Linux users are understandably sceptical about new tools that promise to make life easier, so I am keeping my expectations firmly grounded, but seeing it get a bit of official recognition feels brilliant.
It is essentially a distro-agnostic terminal assistant designed to help out when things go wrong. If you make a typo, a command fails, a library is missing, or a database is locked, it hooks into your history to get things sorted right from the terminal without a fuss.
It also includes a system scan feature that looks at your hardware to recommend the right drivers and specific packages, which comes in handy during a fresh setup.
It is completely a spare-time passion project, and having it included in the main list is a massive boost.
If anyone fancies giving it a look, the code is on GitHub and it is available on the AUR. I am just really happy to see something I built for myself actually becoming useful to the wider community.
Thank you all for your support throughout the whole journey.
Without your suggestions and the terminal outputs that have been kindly provided by the r/linux and r/commandline community I would not be able to get Mend where it is now.
friendlyreminder_@reddit
This looks like a pain to write, you had to manually put in the package names for a bunch of hardware and all the distros have different package names.
I wouldn't have the patience to look that up and test it all.
This actually touches on a pet peeve of mine. I wish distros would work together to standardize package naming at least for packages they can agree are on are identical in content or at least the broad role of the packages.
With things going in the flatpak and immutable direction I'm not sure it'll ever happen.
ClassroomHaunting333@reddit (OP)
It was a tedious job to put together. Dealing with the inconsistency between how Arch, Fedora, and Debian name packages takes a lot of time. As I said in the post, without the help from the subs I mentioned, it would not be possible to make it where it is.
The point about standardisation is completely valid. It is a shame the ecosystem is so fragmented, and the shift towards Flatpaks means native standardisation probably will not happen. Since Mend handles low-level system bits like drivers and PGP keys, containerised formats cannot really touch that layer anyway.
Ill-Truth7927@reddit
Congrats! Getting onto that list is no joke - those maintainers are pretty selective about what makes the cut. The distro-agnostic approach is smart too, saves everyone from having to juggle different tools depending on what they're running.
ClassroomHaunting333@reddit (OP)
Cheers! Yeah, those maintainers are quite thorough with the repo standards and checks, so getting the green light felt brilliant.
Making it distro-agnostic was a priority from the start. Switching helper tools when moving between an Arch desktop and a Debian server is a proper headache, so the goal was to build something that just works everywhere. Glad the approach makes sense to others.