Feature request: `set script-quiet` setting to make `@` consistently mean "mute" for shebang/script recipes

[PaulRBerg]

Problem

@ means opposite things depending on recipe kind:

• Line-wise recipes: verbose by default, @ mutes a line (or, with set quiet, mutes the whole file and @ un-mutes).
• Shebang/script recipes: quiet by default, @ does the opposite — it makes just print the script body before running it.

#603 tracked this exact inconsistency. Casey's take there was that flipping the hard-coded default for shebang recipes outright is too disruptive at this point (#603 (comment)). I followed up asking whether a setting to opt into the inversion (rather than changing the default for everyone) would be reasonable (#603 (comment)), but that didn't get picked up as its own issue.

Solution

Add a new justfile setting, analogous to set quiet (#1698), scoped to shebang/script recipes:

set script-quiet := true  # default, current behavior: scripts are quiet, @ makes them print

set script-quiet := false  # scripts are verbose by default, @ mutes them — same meaning as line-wise @

With script-quiet := false, just prints the script body before executing it unless the recipe is prefixed with @ (or annotated [quiet], mirroring [no-quiet] for the set quiet case). Default stays true, so nothing changes for existing justfiles — this is purely opt-in, sidestepping the breaking-change concern from #603.

End state once both settings are used together: @ always means "suppress output for this recipe," regardless of whether it's line-wise or script.

[casey]

I'm not totally opposed to adding this, but it feels pretty niche, and god knows Just already has enough niche settings 😅 I'll leave this issue open to collect feedback and see what people think.

[PaulRBerg]

Huh!

It might be niche but it would definitely be helpful and it would definitely save AI tokens. I watched Claude/Codex trip over this — they are confused about the default behavior of @ when applied to shebang recipes.