Introduction

Ion is a modern system shell that features a simple, yet powerful, syntax. It is written entirely in Rust, which greatly increases the overall quality and security of the shell. It also offers a level of performance that exceeds that of Dash, when taking advantage of Ion's features. While it is developed alongside, and primarily for, RedoxOS, it is a fully capable on other *nix platforms.

Ion Shell

Ion is still a WIP, and both its syntax and rules are subject to change over time. It is still quite a ways from becoming stabilized, but we are getting very close. Changes to the syntax at this time are likely to be minimal.

Ion Specification

Ion has a RFC process for language proposals. Ion's formal specification is located within the rfcs branch. The RFC process is still in the early stages of development, so much of the current and future implementation ideas have yet to be written into the specification.

Ion Manual

The Ion manual is generated automatically on each commit via mdBook. The manual is located here on Redox OS's website. It is also included in the source code for Ion, within the manual directory, which you may build with mdbook.

Packages

Pop!_OS / Ubuntu

The following PPA supports the 18.04 (bionic) and 18.10 (cosmic) releases. Bionic builds were made using the Pop_OS PPA's rustc 1.32.0 package.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mmstick76/ion-shell

Developer set up

Those who are developing software with Rust should install the Rustup toolchain manager. After installing rustup, run rustup override set 1.32.0 to set your Rust toolchain to the version that Ion is targeting at the moment. To build for Redox OS, rustup override set nightly is required to build the Redox dependencies.

Build dependencies

Please ensure that both cargo and rustc 1.32.0 or higher is installed for your system. Release tarballs have not been made yet due to Ion being incomplete in a few remaining areas.

Compile instructions for distribution

git clone https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/ion/
cd ion
RUSTUP=0 make # By default RUSTUP equals 1, which is for developmental purposes
sudo make install prefix=/usr
sudo make update-shells prefix=/usr

To compile in DEBUG mode, pass DEBUG=1 as an argument to make

Vim/NeoVim Syntax Highlighting Plugin

We do have an officially-supported syntax highlighting plugin for all the vim/nvim users out there.

Plugin 'vmchale/ion-vim'