Current status of BashSupport Pro

Published Nov 20, 2019

Current status of BashSupport Pro

Summary

The initial version of BashSupport Pro integrates a Bash debugger into your IDE.

BashSupport Pro will be affordable for personal licenses, most likely in the range of $10 to $20 per year. Commercial licenses will be more expensive than personal licenses.

The plugin will be released early 2020.

BashSupport Pro will integrate with JetBrains Shell.
It will also integrate with open–source BashSupport until a good editing environment is available with BashSupport Pro + JetBrains Shell.

Post your thoughts in the BashSupport community forums. Pricing and features are not yet final.

Current development

The major feature of the first version will be a debugger. It’s based on the wonderful bashdb software. It will support Bash v5 and – most likely – Bash v4.

Most features of the debugger integration are implemented. Next is support for Windows and macOS, lots of usability improvements and testing.

Migration path

I would like to allow all current users of BashSupport to use the Pro version.

The original plan was to use JetBrains’s new Shell plugin as foundation and to add features on top of that.
2019.3 comes with a good feature set to view and run Shell scripts. There’s a lot lacking when it comes to edit shell scripts, though. BashSupport is still providing a better editing experience, e.g. to jump to the definition of variables and functions, to rename elements, and to work with included files.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to ship the equivalent feature set with the initial version of BashSupport Pro. It would be counter–productive to offer BashSupport Pro without a good editing experience.

Therefore, you will have a choice to use BashSupport Pro:

1. BashSupport Pro on top of JetBrains’s Shell plugin.
2. BashSupport Pro on top of BashSupport.
   This combination will be supported until BashSupport Pro + JetBrains Shell offer a usable editing environment for scripts. That’s most likely at least a year, or more.
   I’d like to emphasize, that this is a courtesy and that BashSupport Pro will drop integration with open–source BashSupport in the future.

The open–source plugin BashSupport will remain to be available. No new features will be added to it, just like it was announced before.

BashSupport Pro will be made available for the latest stable version of the IDEs only. That’s 2019.3 for the initial version.

Testing BashSupport Pro

Thanks for reading all of this! If you’re interested to test an early version of BashSupport Pro, then send me a message. I’ll contact you when it’s ready for testing.