I feel like if I was forced to use PowerShell I’d fall in love with it and want to use it on Linux. Passing objects between commands instead of text sounds amazing. So many (Linux) shell commands use slightly differently shaped text, it’s annoying. New line separated? Tab separated? Null separated? Comma separated? Multiple fields? JSON? And converting between them all and using different flags to accept different ones is just such a headache.

Fish is great.

I’m an absolute Linux tard, so it’s hilarious to me trying to read and understand most of these comments

I used nushell for a good 6 months, it was nice having structured data, but the syntax difference to bash which I use for my day job was just too jarring to stick with.

Fish was (for me) the right balance of nice syntactic sugar and being able to reasonably expect a bash idiom will work.

I love Nushell, it’s so much more pleasant for writing scripts IMO. I know some people say they’d just use Python if they need more than what a POSIX shell offers, but I think Nushell is a perfect option in between.

With a Nushell scripts you get types, structured data, and useful commands for working with them, while still being able to easily execute and pipe external commands. I’ve only ever had two very minor gripes with Nushell, the inability to detach a process, and the lack of a -l flag for cp. Now that uutils supports the -l flag, Nushell support is a WIP, and I realized systemd-run is a better option than just detaching processes when SSHd into a server.

I know another criticism is that it doesn’t work well with external cli tools, but I’ve honestly never had an issue with any. A ton of CLI tools support JSON output, which can be piped into from json to make working with it in Nushell very easy. Simpler tools often just output a basic table, which can be piped into detect columns to automatically turn it into a Nushell table. Sometimes strange formatting will make this a little weird, but fixing that formatting with some string manipulation (which Nushell also makes very easy) is usually still easier than trying to parse it in Bash.

So you drive daily with nushell and then script in bash for portability?

Sounds not bad actually…

I’ve used nushell for several months, and it really is an amazing shell

It feels more like an actual language than arcane runes, and I can easily makes chains and pipelines and things that would be difficult in bash

Additionally, it makes a pretty good scripting language

thanks, good thread.

Until you discover nushell’s (lack of) quoting rules

That looks a lot like PowerShell

I’m really curious, what’s your favorite shell?

Emacs eshell+eat

It essentially reverses the terminal/shell relationship. Here, it’s the shell that starts a terminal session for every command. Eshell is also tightly integrated with Emacs and has access to all the extended functionality. You can use Lisp in one-liners, you can pipe output directly to an emacs buffer, you can write custom commands as lisp functions, full shortcut customization not limited to terminal keys, history search via the completion framework (i.e. consult-history), easy prompt customization, etc.

There’s also Tramp, which lets you transparently cd into remote hosts via ssh, docker containers, SMB/NFS-shares, archive files, and work with them as if they were normal directories (obviously with limited functionality in some cases, like archives).

And probably a lot of stuff I’m missing right now.

I like nushell, but I love xonsh. Xonsh is the bastard love child of Python and Bash.

it can be thought of as:

• try this statement in Python
• if there’s an exception, try it in bash.

Now, that’s not a very accurate description, because the reality is more nuanced, but it allows for things like:

for file in !(find | grep -i '[.]mp3^'):
    file = Path(file.strip())
    if file != Path('.') and file != file.with_suffix('.mp3'):
    mv @(file) @(file.with_suffix('.mp3'))

Now, there are things in there I wouldn’t bother with normally - like, rather than using mv, I’d just use file.rename(), but the snippet shows a couple of the tools for interaction between xonsh and sh.

• !(foo) - if writing python, execute foo, and return lines
• @(foo) - if writing sh, substitute with the value of the foo variable.

But, either a line is treated in a pyhony way, or in a shelly way - and if a line is shelly, you can reference Python variables or expressions via @(), and if it’s Pythony, you can execute shell code with !() or $(), returning the lines or the exact value, respectively.

Granted, I love python and like shell well enough, and chimeras are my jam, so go figure.

I’ve had nushell as my daily driver for a couple years now and I love it. “Made for actual humans to use” is exactly the description I’d give.

Nushell looks cool but I prefer to stick with the POSIXes so that I know my scripts will always work and syntax always does what I expect it to. I use zsh as a daily driver, and put up with various bashes, ashes, dashes, that come pre-installed with systems I won’t be using loads (e.g. temporary vms).

Looks like it’s taken a page from PowerShell in passing structured data rather than just text.