Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?

I personally use ZSH with Prezto, which makes it considerably better than vanilla ZSH. I've tried Nushell and it seems to work quite fine but it's really a different paradigm that makes you think of the data differently than *sh shells.

I use eshell for most things, but I do have to occasionally pop open an ansi-term.

Bit of a strange one maybe but for my windows machine I've actually been using cmder (conEmu) with ZSH and over the past few years have been extending it with plugins to suit just right.

It's super fast supports everything I need now and couldn't work without it.

I decided last year to bite the bullet and learn Powershell. I think I will no longer have to wonder if there is a better option anymore.

I'm a Linux native guy and I haven't hardly touched Windows in years but I still find myself curious about PowerShell. Is PowerShell even remotely suitable as a Linux shell? Is there any hope for PowerShell on Linux, it's an interesting take on shells.

I would probably turn that around and ask why are you asking?

Outside of command line editing features, some kind of completion, novelties, and prettiness, I think most of the time it always comes back to "I chose this shell due to syntax, or programming of some kind". e.g. tcsh due to the C-ness of it.

I am writing this from Linux, been using csh on Solaris and then bash on linux since, well since back then... I have seen a lot of shells come out, but every time I switch to one I think about my personal needs in the shell and portability (I do manage a large number of boxes, and most of them do not have extra items installed, including shells) so I end up back at bash/dash/sh.

Again, I would ask myself what you need in the shell. If ZSH or Fish or csh or ksh or some esoteric shell fit the bill, why not just try it as a daily driver? I mean, what is the worst possible outcome? (unless you make a living making life support shell driven software...)

i know a fair few eshell users. i’m not among them but they’re out there

oh-my-zsh on Linux is absolutely great, especially with autosuggestions and syntax-highlighting enabled.

On Windows I've settled with Windows Terminal and clink.

I've tried Powershell too but never got used to it. The concept where everything is an object sounds great. But in practice, to me it only is when scripting. When doing interactive work on the command line (which is what I do all day), as a human, nothing beats plain text for me. Enlighten me if this I missed the point of Powershell.

I am a fish fan… but even fish has some difficulties, as many scripts and tools in the wild expect a bash-compatible shell. Otherwise, it is excellent and I use it on my computers 100% of time.

I guess other alternative shells like nu have about the same level of usability. If you like them, you can use them.

I use `fish` as my main shell. It's closer to POSIX than eshell or oil, but it's definitely not POSIX.

Personally, the main thing I like about it is that I can't copy paste bash commands. It forces me to read and understand and then convert. It also has some quality of life stuff I really like. I think next time I'm just going to go back to ZSH though as I feel I have learnt enough from the experience of using it that I'm no longer getting new things out of it, and I don't script in fish enough for the nicer syntax to be beneficial enough for me. Honestly, I prefer ZSH variables over fish variables too

  "\e[A": history-search-backward
  "\e[B": history-search-forward
  "\e[C": forward-char
  "\e[D": backward-char

    bash -c "" # to run some bash inline

    bash -l # to jump to a bash shell

    # set shell
    set -g default-shell /usr/local/bin/fish

I am still kinda bitter about mac os replacing the default bash with zsh. I gained nothing from that unwanted update, but got compatibility pains suddenly.

Is something is more complicated than a one-liner, use a real programming language instead, with proper building blocks, tooling and documentation. Use something like Go to crosscompile if you don't want to depend on something on the host machine.

In my experience, even very trivial short shell scripts over time tend to grow into a pain, that could totally be avoided when using a real language instead.

Try to use it as a daily driver. If you encounter a situation where there's a bug/weirdness/missing feature, you can always temporarily launch bash or whatever to do the one thing you need to do, then exit that (sub)shell and continue with the first one

I've been using fish for a couple years on my work laptops

How about instead of changing the shell get more out from your existing one.

Starship [0] and fzf [1] will make your life much easier in any shell.

I use fish but they work with bash, zsh and the like.

[0] https://starship.rs/

[1] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Bash. Forever.

I'm using Fish for years, tried Nushell recently, but it didn't click for me. While I like the principle of data being more than just plain text, it probably was just too alien to me.

A few here said they don't use Fish or another shell due to compatibility issues, but I wonder what the problem is: If I want to use a script written for another (POSIX) shell, it most likely has a shebang (or I can add it), so it will get properly executed using that other shell…

I’ve used fish for years at work but that’s mostly a personal choice similar to your preferred editor. It’s more productive, but nobody else really sees it.

What’s helped a lot more has been replacing shell scripts with Python once they hit a certain complexity level. Huge reduction in code size, better functionality (e.g. it’s trivial to have good CLI argument parsing so people actually add it), and every time a large bash script has been converted some set of error-handling bugs has been fixed.

Im on Nu shell on Windows os. Im very satisfied with it

I think they're all fine (if they claim some sort of stability) with the proviso that you're going to occasionally want to drop into bash or something to check something out before committing it to a script.

(I assume you're talking about interactive use, not using them as the shebang line in your scripts. I wouldn't do that. But mainly just because then you need everyone to agree to install it, or to install it on your servers, etc.)

> Fish is probably usable, but outside of fish

I use fish, have for years, and I say the above to include it. Sometimes I'm not certain something works as I think it does (bash's myriad interpolation/variable manipulation techniques say) and so I switch shell to test it.

It does have bugs and weirdness of course, especially the vi mode, but it's not going to .. idk, rm -rf / when I only told it to rm -rf ~/.cache/* or something.

hanaryy

Nushell is great for simple tasks. i.e.

  ls **/data.json | each {|it| mv $it.name $"(dirname $it.name)/data.yml" }

Will be much more complex in bash

  find -name "data.json" | xargs -i bash -c "mv \"{}\" \"\$(dirname '{}')/data.yml\""

Note the escaped quotes and dollar signs in bash. It is really difficult to get them right.

In Nutshell we are actually using "functions" (supported syntax-wise) to do the job, so it will be much more simpler.

---

A more complex example from my recent code:

  ls $"(which npm.ps1 | get 0.path | path dirname)/*.ps1" | each {|it| get name | path basename }
    | each {|script_file| $"alias ($script_file | str replace ".ps1" "") = powershell.exe ($script_file)" }
    | str join "\n" | save --force ~/.config/nushell/env-generated.nu

Will be something like this in bash,

  find "$(dirname "$(which npm.ps1)")/" -maxdepth 1 -name "*.ps1" | sed -r "s/^.*\/([^\/]+)\.ps1/alias \1 = powershell.exe \1.ps1/g" >> "$NU_CONFIG_FILE"

Although the bash one is shorter, it takes me 10x more time to write and test. I initially tried to write it with xrgs but given up due to the complexity involved.

I think Nushell is more readable and easy to write for me.

    find . -name data.json -exec rename .json .yml {} +

  for f in **/data.json; mv $f $f:r.yaml

  for f in **/data.json; do mv $f ${f%.json}.yaml; done

    shopt -s globstar
    for f in ./**/data.json; do mv "$f" "${f%json}yml"; done

    find . -name data.json -print0 | while read -rd '' f; do mv "$f" "${f%json}yml"; done

    find . -name data.json -execdir mv {} data.yml \;

    (
        cd "$(which npm.ps1)" && \
        for f in *.ps1; do printf "alias %s='powershell.exe %s'\n" "${f%.ps1}" "$f"; done
    ) >file

Xonsh works pretty great. I've used it as a daily driver in the past but am trying out oh-my-zsh right now. Pathlib (and pathlib.glob) are pretty amazing, and python syntax is great for a shell.

https://xon.sh/

I've been using nushell for a couple of weeks and I'm finding it good enough for a daily driver. I was never much of a shell script person so I don't miss any bash-isms, on the contrary I find that I can easily perform some tasks I'd normally have fired up a Ruby REPL to do, both because the language is much more sane and because it handles structured data and file formats natively. As for normal shell usage (running commands) I definitely prefer it to bash, the completion UI is much nicer and you can set it up very easily for external commands. Also it supports Windows so I don't have to switch to powershell mode when I'm on my gaming PC.

Again, I'm not a shell script person and I never liked sh/bash so I don't have any 1000 line shell scripts that I'll be porting over to nu, and if I need to do something that would take more than a couple lines of code I'll switch to a proper programming language. I definitely wouldn't ship nushell scripts in production or for anything that isn't my local configuration because the commands and the language itself are far from having a stable API.

I've used bash/zsh for 20 years and I've been using nushell daily for work and personal projects since I tried it 6 months ago. It's fantastic -- you can do some really novel things that you would never normally do in a shell. But you do have to be prepared to invest some time in learning to do things differently from POSIX shells. The Discord community is very helpful.