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
Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
21–30 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#22I've been using fish for a couple years on my work laptops
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#23I 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 tha…
I use fish too. My favourite feature is typing part of a command and using up and down arrows to cycle through the results, as opposed to ctrl+R and...I don't remember which one. Functions are easy to define too.
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#24I 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…
Believe the replacement was because bash 4 was GPL3 licensed, and zsh was not. It wasn’t so much for user benefits than it was for security and licensing.
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#25I 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 tha…
I use fish too. My favourite feature is typing part of a command and using up and down arrows to cycle through the results, as opposed to ctrl+R and...I don't remember which one. Functions are easy to define too.
You can easily get bash to do that by adding these lines to your .inputrc file.
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[C": forward-char
"\e[D": backward-charRe: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#26I 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…
I've watched a one line bash pipeline turn into a thousand line python program over the course of about a week. It didn't need new functionality, it was just not proper engineering to leave it in bash.
We never did agree on whether that was right or not. It was something involving digging information out of elf binaries where the python libs were much more verbose than the flags passed to readelf (maybe objdump, it was a while ago).
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#27oh-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 be…
> Enlighten me if this I missed the point of Powershell. Plain-text has gotten annoying to me now (having to shell out to grep, cut, and awk is very meh). What's your pain point when trying to use powershell?
What I feel Powershell does not give: short and simple command names, little syntax, and return values that are interpretable at a glance.
And there's muscle memory of course, that's on me!
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#28I 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 also but still default to bash and run fish manually when I log in. Then if I am trying to paste a command and it doesn't work right, I just type exit and run it in bash.
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#29I 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…
Believe the replacement was because bash 4 was GPL3 licensed, and zsh was not. It wasn’t so much for user benefits than it was for security and licensing.
They could have fix the security bugs.
Re: Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
#30I 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.
How does it compare to oh my zsh?
Anecdote: I started with oh my zsh and moved over to prezto. One thing that immediately struck me with prezto is just how fast it was. The shell boot up was instant, I don't know what oh my zsh was doing but it would take a while before it became interactive.
I didn't care enough to dig deep into the why, but have happily been stuck on prezto for the last few years.