Introduction
NutBox is an ever-growing collection of .NET 2.0 tools usable on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh. It derives part of its functionality from GNU/POSIX, but the majority of the feature set originates with my own personal needs – and in time perhaps your suggestions.
Purpose
The aim of the project is to (eventually, perhaps) replace and/or supplement all of the POSIX command-line tools with more modern, up-to-date, and well-designed .NET equivalents. Initially, NutBox is very small, but I hope to see it grow to hundreds of commands over the coming years and decades.
I genuinely believe that .NET is the way to go because .NET apps can be executed on all major platforms and do not suffer the performance penalty that Java apps suffer. Contrary to what you’d expect, .NET programs run really fast. So far I have not sensed any particular slowdown from using .NET tools rather than native tools.
I got the idea for NutBox because of the current lack of native 64-bit tools to Windows x64. It turns out that nobody wants to port their 32-bit console utilities to Windows x64 because the 32-bit console utilities run so well. But being a bit pedantic about it all, I prefer my frequently used tools to run in the native 64-bit mode. And .NET apps do just that - run natively on any platform.
Furthermore, I have a number of times run into bizarre licensing schemes in various freeware packages and I want to completely eliminate such licensing terms from NutBox - hence NutBox is donated to the Public Domain and is completely without license.
Finally, I wanted to code for .NET - and had no other realistic project in mind. I considered using Boo (http://boo.codehaus.org) to implement NutBox, but three things kept me from doing so:
- Only a fraction of C# developers know Python or Boo (I hope for contributions!).
- Boo requires a run-time DLL (Boo.Lang.dll), which I dislike a tiny bit.
- Boo is not overly well documented IMHO.