If you haven’t heard of it before, nutshell is an alternative to bash/zsh: https://github.com/nushell/nushell
Bash being ubiquitous is mildly underrated in the article. When I log into a random server, I know there will be bash.
But I agree about text as a least common denominator being too restrictive. I might give nushell a try for local stuff.
IMO, nushell isn’t really an alternative to bash/zsh, unless it has backwards compatibility with bash/zsh commands and scripts. I would say it’s more of an alternative to PowerShell, given how similarly it behaves to it. It’s for people who like how PowerShell works, but want a shell that feels a bit more homely on a *nix system, and don’t want to be involved in the Microsoft ecosystem (because PowerShell on Linux is really just a management interface for Microsoft’s cloud offerings).
It is an alternative to bash/zsh. But it is not a drop in replacement for them. An alternative does not have to be compatible or else it would not be an alternative to powershell. It is not a viable alternative for those looking for POSIX compliance shell though.
I really like this project, but it’d need to be at least as ubiquitous as python for me to put serious effort into learning it. This is what bash will always have on these experimental shells unfortunately.
Ok dang I’ve been reading nutshell for quite a moment…
This looks incredibly powerful and cool… but also like the kind of thing that may be a bit too niche or experimental for me to learn after just 2 years of the occasional casual Bash scripting and 4 weeks of having used zsh as my terminal.
I am trying to resist
I feel you on this. I recently switched to fish, and have one or two
.fish
scripts that don’t really “do” anything. Everything else remotely important is still in bash, and I’ll probably keep it that wayMaybe somewhere down the line…
Nushell is nice, but the lack of vi-style keybindings killed it for me as a replacement for bash. If that ever changes, I’ll try it again.
Nushell not being able to handle “literally json with functions” nix kinda killed it for me. I don’t work with json and yaml is easy to read but i do work with nix and being able to view big pieces of code nushell style would be nice.