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What Is It?

tako is a command language and shell for GNU/Linux (and Mac OS, and Windows via Cygwin or MSYS2), based on Python (version 3) and GNU Bash, and forked from xonsh.

tako is not Bash-compatible, but rather is designed to provide an intuitive interface for common shell operations (to reduce time spent looking up how to do things in Bash/sed/awk).

There are three equally valid ways of looking at tako: it is a shell with a sane scripting language, and/or it is Python with extra syntax to make running external commands easier, and/or it is a stripped-down version of xonsh (you can see some of the differences from xonsh here).

A short list of nice features:

Details of how to use and/or customize tako are available from the documentation page. In the meantime, here is a quick (~5 minutes) demo, demonstrating some features of tako:

Can I Use It?

Yes! tako is free/libre software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3+ . Instructions for downloading and installing tako are available on the Download/Install page.

You are also free to use the tako logo (the octopus eating a taco), which is available under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. It is also available in a larger size.

Is It Any Good?

Yes.

Included Software

tako includes a few other pieces of Free/Libre Software:

 

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Creative Commons License
The contents of this page are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The web site is available online at https://takoshell.org, or as a Tor "onion service" at http://takoezpr7wxrc7d6.onion or http://tehbemfqolualhxwkyimu3bdob5s4hkrfuwbwxzbblncjy2j2owgolqd.onion.

The source code for the web site is available in a git repository: git clone git://hz.mit.edu/takoshell.org.git.