BashSupport Pro 1.4 — now standalone

Published Jul 18, 2020

Summary

• Version 1.4 of BashSupport Pro has been released today. It’s another major update and prepares the retirement of legacy BashSupport.
• BashSupport Pro is now a standalone plugin. It doesn’t depend on the JetBrains Shell plugin anymore. No feature has been removed.
• BashSupport Pro comes with a new, powerful run configuration type. It also supports the run configurations of legacy BashSupport and of the JetBrains Shell plugin to allow a smooth migration.

BashSupport Pro is Now Standalone

Previously BashSupport Pro needed either legacy BashSupport, or the JetBrains Shell plugin to make it work. These dependencies have now been dropped and BashSupport Pro is now a standalone plugin.

The original plan was to depend on the Shell plugin and to add extensions on top. It turned out that this wasn’t as good as anticipated. Some extensions, e.g. the implementation of language dialects, are not possible with such a setup. Other changes, like fixes to the parser, have to be submitted to JetBrains to be included with the next major version of the IDE — backports are usually not possible. This adds up to 4 months of delay until such a change is finally available to users of BashSupport Pro. The IDEs have a very different release schedule than the plugin.

BashSupport Pro incorporates all functionality of the JetBrains Shell plugin and everything else which was available in earlier versions. No feature has been removed.

Existing features have been improved, whenever possible. For example, shfmt and ShellCheck binaries are bundled with the plugin. You don’t have to download these programs to enable formatting or the ShellCheck integration.

Powerful, New Run Configurations

A new type of run configuration has been added. Read more about it. For example, it finally allows you to run inline snippets without a script file on disk. Additionally, it’s made to be shared in a team and simplifies path mapping on Windows for WSL, MSYS, and Cygwin Bash.

Support for Your Old Run Configurations

As noted above, BashSupport Pro is now standalone. Many users have crated run configurations with the legacy BashSupport or the JetBrains Shell plugin. BashSupport Pro supports the configurations of both plugins, so that you don’t have to have these plugins installed.