Posted by ravenical 1 day ago
However, regarding the posix skepticism - I think OP has missed (or just not mentioned) the actual thing that keeps bash/zsh from being unseated.
Industrial standards are a good thing just because they’re standards. They’re right that a redesign would be superior in terms of raw design, but this is only useful if it’s adopted widely enough so that you don’t have to context switch between two fundamental systems. I spin up a new VM somewhere and it's going to have bash. I use a tool and I expect it to follow a particular convention - having to figure out which I'm reaching for adds an amount of friction that would make most work untenable.
I like zsh but I also want something better. Type safety and robust completions would make me very happy, but if we're going to make the switch we have to do it as an industry - with a set of agreed upon interfaces and standards that are carefully thought out and built on consensus. I don't know if that's possible given the massive complexity of the state of affairs but that's what it would take.
Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use. I cannot yet discern any limit to how much thought has been put into it.
I’m stunned in a good way. I’m writing shell scripts without any pain — actually I much prefer them to Python! With the language-server integration – I use Zed, but I'm sure they exist in VS Code and others too – I can see errors in scripts as I write them! (Including typos in pathnames! Amazing.)
I have to admit Nushell didn’t become my daily driver right away; it took a few years for me to switch fully. I don't know exactly why, but it probably had to do with its lack of POSIX compatibility. I now see this as a necessary break for Nushell to pursue its vision.
About expectations: some people will be delighted immediately and get hooked, but not all. We're all busy and adopting a new tool can feel like a leap of faith. For me, it has been worth it. Nushell has felt like planting a garden that gives back way more than you put into it.
I wrote up a quick gist [1] that shows how nice the experience is to write a new command (i.e. function) in Nushell.
[1]: "Building Argsort with Nushell" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528644
Get-ADObject -Filter * -Properties * | ConvertTo-JSON > ADObjects.json
And you have access to ALL of the .NET library.
' "Here is an ampersand... &" '
To clarify, in PowerShell there is a difference between text between single quotes (e.g. '$test') and double quotes (e.g. "$test"). Single quote strings are literal strings, so whatever text is contained within them is reproduced as written. Double quote strings are expandable strings, which means that certain text inside the string is evaluated before it is returned. If you have double quotes in a literal string, you'll see double quotes within that string, and the same should be true for ampersands.
Shell languages make sense if you believe in the Unix philosophy. For me, the problem with the Unix philosophy is the endless serialization and deserialization as well as lack of proper error handling. So nushell for me is a good answer to an ill-posed question.
The approach I have been taking is a single binary with a billion subcommands and aliasing these. I currently have two of these in Rust, one in Swift. I tried going all Rust but integrating with certain aspects of macOS is just so much simpler in Swift.
Like the recent push to make CLI development suck less (e.g. argument parsing used to be painful but is solved now) has made developing CLI tools a lot less painful.
yes, it was _originally_ only for Windows, but PowerShell 6+ uses .NET Core, which is OS independent. this means that a few helper functions like GeneratePassword[0] are gone, but it's _mostly_ at parity with .NET.
the Verb-Noun structure can be confusing at first, but once you know the approved verbs[1], you can usually guess your way through command discovery, which is not something i can say for most POSIX tools (useradd and adduser do different things!!)
it's also object oriented by design, with default aliases like ?[2] and %[3], querying structured data is a breeze.
- want to check a CSV? Import-CSV[4].
- want to call a REST/SOAP endpoint? Invoke-RestMethod[5] has you covered.
- DNS queries? Resolve-DnsName[6]
as it's built on top of .NET, you get the whole CLR[7] at your fingertips! you can make a TCP client[8] in PowerShell, or even just write C# directly in your terminal[9] and execute it the same way.
such a flexible and useful language, even if it is a little slow and owned by micro$oft. but it _is_ open source[10]!
---
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/system.web.security.m...
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/scripting/developer/c...
[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/microsoft.powe...
[3]: https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/microsoft.powe...
[4]: https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/microsoft.powe...
[5]: https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/microsoft.powe...
[6]: https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/dnsclient/reso...
[7]: https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/standard/clr
[8]: https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/system.net.sockets.tc...
[9]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/weekend-scripter-ru...
I use nushell now, and its community is fantastic. It may face breaking changes every so often, but it has a much faster execution speed and more features if you're not tied into the .NET ecosystem.
You can design anything you want (see GTK for an example of moving target). But if you want anyone to use it, better stick to standards.
Something I came to appreciate is that the 50MB binary is really battery included. You will be able to deal with JSON, XML, SQLite DBs, HTTP requests and more. I personally do not need anything else.
Now, no matter how much you get excited about it, do not write too much production code with it as it still change and break often between releases.
It's really its own kind of thing. It's definitely not just another shell.
I've written very impressive and very complex software in nu. I fully expect it to take off very fast as it nears a stable v1.0. I can't imagine going back to anything else.
for i in {1..10}; do
echo $i
done
I write far too much stuff in BASH, but for me it's just not worth moving to using a different shell due to its ubiquity. There's also the question of "will this still run easily in 20 years". Of course, BASH is a nightmare for bugs and foot-guns unless you make a point of defensive coding (e.g. surround variables with double-quotes and using Shellcheck to point out common errors).
By the way, the article goes on to mention the large number of options to "ls". Don't try to parse the output of "ls" in scripts as there's better ways to do things: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs