Stream: beginners

Topic: complementary tooling

Rick Hull (Jan 20 2026 at 15:08):

I am using Just (justfile) to organize build and testing tasks (Zig-based platform development). I know some other folks are using nix similarly. Someone else just mentioned nushell which I have been interested in for a long time, but haven't taken the dive yet.

Rick Hull (Jan 20 2026 at 15:12):

I use direnv and .envrc at the project root for loading some portion of a development environment (env vars, typically) when I cd $proj_root. I have used asdf a fair bit, mostly with Ruby projects, and mise looks even better. nix has a strong role to play here, with or without the flake system.

Rick Hull (Jan 20 2026 at 15:51):

I have been using the gh client lately to upload and download gists. I have a small script rocgist.sh that you can use, in place of roc, to execute a roc file, and upload the file, STDOUT, and STDERR automatically.

UPDATE: rocgist.sh is now hosted in the (temporary) roc-init repo; the script has been enhanced since I pasted the original link.

# rocgist.sh invokes gh
if ! command -v gh; then
  echo "install gh first"
  exit 1
fi

# add to PATH as rocgist
mv rocgist.sh ~/.local/bin/rocgist

# normal testing
roc test/foo.roc
# ...

# chat, help!
rocgist test/foo.roc
# executes as above
# creates gist with:
# test/foo.roc
# STDOUT.txt
# STDERR.txt

# include additional files for context
rocgist test/foo.roc platform/Foo.roc
# executes as above, including platform/Foo.roc in the gist

Luke Boswell (Jan 20 2026 at 19:23):

You are going to love basic-cli for scripting I think :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Rick Hull (Jan 20 2026 at 23:43):

My justfile

Last updated: Feb 20 2026 at 12:27 UTC