Runner Mode

Last updated Dec 13, 2022
Customize the interactive script/command runner.

Hilbish is unique, when interactive it first attempts to run input as Lua and then tries shell script. But if you’re normal, you wouldn’t really be using Hilbish anyway but you’d also not want this (or maybe want Lua only in some cases.)

The “runner mode” of Hilbish is customizable via hilbish.runnerMode, which determines how Hilbish will run user input. By default, this is set to hybrid which is the previously mentioned behaviour of running Lua first then going to shell script. If you want the reverse order, you can set it to hybridRev and for isolated modes there is sh and lua respectively.

You can also set it to a function, which will be called everytime Hilbish needs to run interactive input. For example, you can set this to a simple function to compile and evaluate Fennel, and now you can run Fennel. You can even mix it with sh to make a hybrid mode with Lua replaced by Fennel.

An example:

hilbish.runnerMode(function(input)
	local ok = pcall(fennel.eval, input)
	if ok then
		return input, 0, nil
	end

	return hilbish.runner.sh(input)
end)

The hilbish.runner interface is an alternative to using hilbish.runnerMode and also provides the sh and Lua runner functions that Hilbish itself uses. A runner function is expected to return 3 values: the input, exit code, and an error. The input return is there incase you need to prompt for more input. If you don’t, just return the input passed to the runner function. The exit code has to be a number, it will be 0 otherwise and the error can be nil to indicate no error.

Functions

These are the “low level” functions for the hilbish.runner interface.

• setMode(mode) > The same as hilbish.runnerMode
• sh(input) -> input, code, err > Runs input in Hilbish’s sh interpreter
• lua(input) -> input, code, err > Evals input as Lua code

The others here are defined in Lua and have EmmyLua documentation. These functions should be preferred over the previous ones.

• setCurrent(mode) > The same as setMode, but works with runners managed via the functions below.
• add(name, runner) > Adds a runner to a table of available runners. The runner argument is either a function or a table with a run callback.
• set(name, runner) > The same as add but requires passing a table and overwrites if the named runner already exists.
• get(name) > runner > Gets a runner by name. It is a table with at least a run function, to run input.
• exec(cmd, runnerName) > Runs cmd with a runner. If runnerName isn’t passed, the current runner mode is used.