I’ve been trying nushell and words fail me. It’s like it was made for actual humans to use! 🤯 🤯 🤯
It even repeats the column headers at the end of the table if the output takes more than your screen…
Trying to think of how to do the same thing with awk/grep/sort/whatever is giving me a headache. Actually just thinking about awk is giving me a headache. I think I might be allergic.
I’m really curious, what’s your favorite shell? Have you tried other shells than your distro’s default one? Are you an awk wizard or do you run away very fast whenever it’s mentioned?
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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).
I don’t really mind having a non-POSIX shell since it doesn’t prevent bash scripts from working, but I get that if you want portability bash is still best since it’ll work mostly anywhere.
I prefer getting comfortable with bash, because it’s everywhere and I need it for work anyway (no fancy shells in remote VMs). But you can customize bash a lot to give more colored feedback or even customize the shortcuts with readline. Another one is pwsh (powershell) because it’s by default in Windows machines that (sadly) I sometimes have to use as VMs too. But you can also install it in linux since it’s now open source.
But if I wanted to experiment personally I’d go for xonsh, it’s a python-based one. So you have all the tools and power of python with terminal convenience.
Yeah if you need to work on machines with bash it makes sense to stick with it. Sorry you have to work on Windows… how is powershell compared to bash?
I don’t know python but xonsh seems really cool, especially since like nushell it works on both linux and windows so you don’t have to bother about OS specific syntax
powershell, in concept, is pretty powerful since it’s integrated with C# and allows dealing with complex data structures as objects too, similar to nushell (though it does not “pretty-print” everything the way nushell does, at least by default).
But in practice, since I don’t use it as much I never really get used to it and I’m constantly checking how to do things… I’m too used to posix tools and I often end up bringing over a portable subset of msys2, cygwin or similar whenever possible, just so I can use grep, sed, sort, uniq, curl, etc in Windows ^^U …however, for scripts where you have to deal with structured data it’s superior since it has builtin methods for that.
Fish is great.
Looks like it’s taken a page from PowerShell in passing structured data rather than just text.
Oh I didn’t know powershell did that too! It sure beats endless parsing errors
That was the foundational concept in powershell; everything is an object. They then went a ruined it with insane syntax and a somewhat logical, but entirely
in practiceimpractical verb-noun command structure.Nushell is powershell for humans. And helps that it runs across all systems. It’s one of the first things I install.
somewhat logical, but entirely in practice verb-noun command structure.
That’s supposed to be “impractical”, not “in practice”, for others reading along.
For example, the “proper” command to list a directory is:
Get-ChildItem
The “proper” command to fetch a webpage is:Invoke-WebRequest https://example.com/In these particular cases, they do have aliases defined, so you can use
ls,dirandcurlinstead, but …yeah, that’s still generally what the command names are like.It’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages out there. I genuinely feel like this kind of defeats the point of having a scripting language in the first place, when it isn’t succinct.
Like, you’re hardly going to use it interactively, because it is so verbose, so you won’t know the commands very well. Which means, if you go to write a script with Powershell, you’ll need to look up how to do everything just as much as with a full-fledged programming language. And I do typically prefer the better tooling of a full-fledged programming language…
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’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
cdinto 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.
Until you discover nushell’s (lack of) quoting rules
Can you elaborate?
Last I checked, there was no rigorous system for how quoting worked, such as how to escape a quote inside a string.
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.
I was under the impression that it was available on Linux?
It is, but I know myself and realistically unless I’m forced to learn it in an environment where it’s first class I’m not going to use it on a regular basis.
![I must have died and gone to heaven [nushell]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6be963b1-c17d-4397-a0d0-228e85162768.png){kind=link}