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We like to say "The command line is our passion. Therefore we invest in the command line experience, knowing that most people will never see it." Sounds grandiose! Bluefin CLI is a a terminal experience designed around shipping a new "default terminal experience" with modern tools. But it also has things like the just task runner, making the community shared aliases and shortcuts easy. That just lets the good stuff float to the top. Actually we should probably just call it "Bluefin for Mac and Windows", once we have the wallpaper stuff figured out, which is where we need your help!
Bluefin CLI is one of my favorite Bluefin features. I get to host meetings with CNCF Ambassadors and they have the coolest prompt setups, etc. I love checking out a fellow nerd's loadout. You start to find cool little tools that just freshen up the Linux command line experience. And of course they're all written in rust, duh. We've been building bluefin-cli — the opt-in terminal experience that ships with Bluefin — into something that runs anywhere. Today it's available as an early alpha on macOS, any Linux distribution, and Windows via WSL or PowerShell.
This work is brought to you by James, who has been working on this single handedly. In Universal Blue tradition, this feature started off as a meme. Send him a donation if you wanna support his efforts!
What is bluefin-cli?#
On Bluefin, ujust bluefin-cli turns on a curated set of modern command line tools: eza, bat, zoxide, atuin, starship, ripgrep, fd, ugrep, tealdeer, and more. The philosophy is simple — a greenfield terminal experience using the best tools available today, with the ability to toggle it off and return to your known-good kit at any time. That toggle is important because this is an opinionated setup you should be able to turn it off. It's also designed to not be too crazy, we want subtle bling here. And anyway it's a template for you to build off if you want to go customize everything. And we use this system to pull in Flatpaks like Podman Desktop, which is an awesome GUI way to manage your containers. This could all be adapted to bring the same developer experience to other operating systems. "Bluefin the Application" I guess.
Some of Bluefin's best parts are common aliases. I want ujust update and ujust bios in Ubuntu and Windows. PRs to make it nice and slick would be appreciated.
And our community curated ujust bbrew app lists are great, I love it when someone finds a new CLI tool in an exciting space, especially in AI. I learned about llmfit, a nice tool that figures out the optimal local model for your hardware. Knowing that we're all curating awesomeness is a really fun part of this!
Why?#
I've always argued that the Linux development experience competes best when you do container development. This is the technology that forced Microsoft and Apple to adopt cloud native in the first place. MacOS even has it's own container tool, an analogue to podman. Each OS ships something, and Docker and podman run on all of them. We have a diverse set of implementations, but one common standard. I betcha distrobox would work on that Mac thing if it doesn't already.
There's just something about doing it on Linux, on the platform it was designed for, that leads to that extra bit of user experience. And the one thing I wish more Linux nerds would understand, we live in a cross platform world. Changing platforms is tough enough, let's at least give the developers a comfortable place to land! An operating system agnostic development environment is a competitive advantage when we have home court advantage.
Expectations#
This is an alpha. What we want is for you to be able to have the Bluefin experience on the Mac and Windows, wallpapers and everything. James is almost there, we just need people to give the thing a once over, see what needs to happen. Ideally we want one click happyness for both systems eventually.
Installation#
You need Homebrew installed on the system:
brew install ublue-os/experimental-tap/bluefin-cli
On Windows with PowerShell, enable shell integration after installing:
bluefin-cli shell powershell on
On bash, zsh, or fish:
bluefin-cli shell bash on
# or
bluefin-cli shell zsh on
# or
bluefin-cli shell fish on
What you get#
Once enabled, bluefin-cli brings the bling:
eza— modern replacement forlsbat—catwith syntax highlighting and git integrationzoxide— smartercdthat learns your habitsatuin— shell history sync across machinesstarship— fast, cross-shell promptuutils-coreutils— Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils - that's right, before Ubuntu did it lol!ripgrep,fd,ugrep— faster search toolstealdeer— fasttldrfor quick command references
You can also grab Bluefin artwork and wallpaper collections, browse and install curated Brewfiles via the ujust bbrew command, and run bluefin-cli motd show to get the same Message of the Day that greets Bluefin users at every new terminal.
This is an early alpha#
The cross-platform release is early. Things will be rough in places. Open issues with feedback — that's how this gets better.
The full source is at hanthor/bluefin-cli. Contributions welcome, we'd love feature parity!
If you're already running Bluefin, nothing changes — ujust bluefin-cli still works the same way. This is for everyone else who wants in.