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 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 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.

The Ion manual online is generated automatically on each commit via mdBook and hosted on Redox OS's website.

Building the manual for local reference

Sources for the manual are located in the manual directory.

You can build the manual using

make manual
mdbook build -d ../public manual

See the examples folder and the Parallelion project

The following PPA supports the 18.04 (bionic) and 19.04 (disco) releases. Bionic builds were made using the Pop_OS PPA's rustc 1.39.0 package.

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

Those who are developing software with Rust should install the Rustup toolchain manager. After installing rustup, run rustup override set 1.39.0 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.

Please ensure that both cargo and rustc 1.39.0 or higher is installed for your system. Release tarballs have not been made yet due to Ion being incomplete in a few remaining areas.

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

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

Plugin 'vmchale/ion-vim'