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GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

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Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#191
post #162
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a single-sample statistic I can share with you, I like to think I'm a well seasoned C/C++ developer, and have experience with all sorts of relatively low-level technical stuff and a good grasp on the internals of how things (like e.g. the kernel) work. Yet I got confused the first time ever some README told me to run "npm install blah". WTF is NPM? I didn't care, really, I just wanted to use blah. Conversely, late…

There was a time that I didn't know what npm is (I'm not even remotely a web developer). So I used my computer to do some basic research.

Don't focus on the specifics, consider the NPM thing an analogy for any other piece of software.

I've found instances where some documentation instructions pointed to run Maven, and the commands worked in their machine because Maven is highly dependent on customizations and local cache. But it failed in other machines that didn't have this parameter configured, or that package version cached locally. And trust me, Maven can be _very_ obtuse and hard to troubleshoot, too much implicit magic happening.

Testing in a clean container or VM would have raised those issues before the readme was written and published. Hence my point stands, testing commands in a clean system is akin to testing a web page in a private tab, to prevent any previous local state polluting the test.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#192
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerShell from Microsoft is looking too alien on Unix. Just looking at the syntax I already feel uncomfortable. It's hard for me to criticize it because I haven't used it, but it looks like it was designed by a committee and overdesigned. I.e. it wasn't created from the need, like someone at Microsoft wanted to automate his work and created PS to solve his problem. It looks like some boss decided: "They have shells,…

I'm sorry, are you a shell user? Since when ~, for example, is easy to type and - is hard to type? LOL. First of all your backstory is wrong, it was a 1-person project. Then, about the features, all those long, explicit commands have short versions. Secondly, I agree that Powershell feels a bit alien on Unix, which will probably be the main reason its adoption will never be amazing.

For a long time the Windows equivalent of ~ was %USERPROFILE% which was definitely harder to type than ~. Eventually they introduced the shortcut on Windows too.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#193
post #4

Kudos for writing something in rust and not appending "written in rust!" everywhere.

Why is everything written in rust nowadays? Apart from the safety it provides.

I write a lot of personal small utilities in Rust these days: The tooling is more modern than C++, it's more consistent cross platform, and it doesn't suffer the VM startup time of Python, which I would have used previously.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've already had languages that could replace C. Ironically Pascal was replaced by C on home systems. But Rust isn't a C replacement, it's a C++ replacement. HN talks about Rust like there was a void before it but there wasn't. I think it's great that the community have finally gotten behind a safer language and I think Rust is a worthy candidate for the community to get behind. But I'm sick of reading about Rust as…

Rust is far from "one of a kind". There's a similar-ish project for C at https://ziglang.org/ , and to be honest, there have been 20 such projects in the past, 6000 if you count all the total failures, I just like this one.

That's my point :)

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#195
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Oh-my-zsh too but I hate that it constantly asks me to update itself and it isn't exactly the quickest update either. Either update automatically in the background or don't tell me about updates at all. Don't constantly nag me when I start new shells!

I used to use oh-my-zsh and never really understood it. Turns out what I mostly wanted was `zsh-autosuggestions` and `zsh-syntax-highlighting` plugins, plus some sane history settings [0]. I've been oh-my-zsh-free for three months, my computers are now less cluttered and more straightforward. [0]: https://github.com/tasuki/dotrc/commit/e3769134e758d02a947ef...

I also uninstalled it pretty quickly after having tried it. Additionally, I use powerline, fzf, and easy-motion in zsh though.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#196
post #191
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time that I didn't know what npm is (I'm not even remotely a web developer). So I used my computer to do some basic research.

Don't focus on the specifics, consider the NPM thing an analogy for any other piece of software. I've found instances where some documentation instructions pointed to run Maven, and the commands worked in their machine because Maven is highly dependent on customizations and local cache. But it failed in other machines that didn't have this parameter configured, or that package version cached locally. And trust me, Ma…

Testing in a clean container tests deploying in a clean container. For me, I run a computer :) Maven sounds like a nightmare tbh so I can understand that that specific piece of software has warts. That said, a good piece of package management software will be relatively agnostic to where its run and have a dependable set of behaviours. I much prefer that to a world where every bit of software is run on any conceivable combination of OS and hardware. What an absolute drain on brain space and creative effort!

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "nushell/nushell" part makes it clear which repo it is talking about.

I didn't find it clear, I also thought it was a GitHub project.

I found it clear it wasn't a GitHub project.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#198
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Cargo doubling as both build tool and package manager is a big factor here. The combination of Cargo + crates.io makes it very easy to write some Rust code and make it available to anyone with Cargo on their system. Either by `cargo install nu` to build it from sources on crates.io or `cargo install` inside the git repo to build my own customized version. No more waiting for distro packagers to keep up. Putti…

This is insanity and hubris. "It's so easy!" yes if you have the language and tools de jour installed and up to date. I want none of that. It was node and npm. Then go. Now Rust and cargo. Oh, I forgot ruby. And all this needs to be up to date or things break. (And if you do update them then things you are actively using will break.) I don't need more tamagochis, in fact the less I have, the better. What happened to…

You happen to have cmake or autotools installed, others happen to have cargo installed.

Once cargo/cmake/autotools/make/npm/mvn/setup.py/whatever runs, the process of taking the output and packaging it for your preferred distro is the same.

There's more work involved if you want a distro to actually pick it up and include it in their repos around not using static linking, but if you're asking for a .deb/.rpm on github actions, that's not needed.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#199
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you download the native binaries then? Rust isn't an interpreted language, you only need the rust toolchain if you want to build from source.

Binary releases seem uncommon from my perspective. Every time I go to install a piece of software written in Rust from homebrew, it invariably starts installing some massive Rust toolchain as a dependency, at which point I give up and move on. Maybe it's a case of the packagers taking a lazy route or something, or maybe there is a reason for depending on cargo. I have no idea.

Isn't homebrew specifically supposed to build from source? e.g. the example on the homepage of a recipe is running ./configure && make on wget.

The fact that you installed the XCode CLI tools for that wget example to work when you first installed homebrew because homebrew itself requires it, and you only get Cargo the first time you get a rust dependency seems to be what you're really complaining about.

Re: GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell

#200

The title is somewhat misleading and makes it seem like this is a GitHub company initiative rather than a project just hosted on GitHub. I've not seen this title format on HN before. Could it be changed?

I think the "nushell/nushell" part makes it clear which repo it is talking about.

I'm in that camp. I read the URL without issues
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