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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

#221

Post by systematical »

maccard wrote: post #133
j1elo wrote: post #107

Thinking this is so cool! I was wondering if seriously buying into an alternate shell like this would be worth it in the long run. Would really love to read from people who use(d) an alternative shell, both success and failure stories. I cannot shake from my head the idea that buying into a non-standard shell will only work for personal projects in one's own workstation, but it won't fly too far for company work beca…

I tried fish for a while. The differing syntax between fish and bash for fundamental things mean I was running all my scripts through bash anyway, and if I wanted to share them/use them elsewhere in the company it had to be bash, so I swapped back to bash.

Fish user here. I've accepted having to drop down to bash here and there. No big deal for me.

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

#222

Post by vips7L »

rjzzleep wrote: post #100
kaba0 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you write a bash one-liner that gets the free memory of your system? Is the awk blackmagic better than selecting an item of an object? Of course new things will be harder to write but it’s a people problem not something inherent with PS.

I find cut easier to use than remembering awk syntax. So I get where you're coming from, but it's just a tad disingenuous don't you think? Especially since `free` `man free` is definitely easier to remember than Get-Whateverfunctioncall is

Is it easier? Because I would expect man free to go to the C stdlib.h definition.

You’re just familiar with the former and not the latter currently.

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

#223

Post by sudhirj »

j1elo wrote: post #107

Thinking this is so cool! I was wondering if seriously buying into an alternate shell like this would be worth it in the long run. Would really love to read from people who use(d) an alternative shell, both success and failure stories. I cannot shake from my head the idea that buying into a non-standard shell will only work for personal projects in one's own workstation, but it won't fly too far for company work beca…

I wouldn’t use a custom shell in company work, but I’d use it for company work. I treat custom shells like a custom keyboard or shortcuts in the OS. Shells can help a lot in your day to day command line ergonomics, like presentation (always know which branch and directory I’m on, time and time taken for commands) and ease of use (autocomplete, aliases, shortcuts). But I wouldn’t script into them for professional work. Just plain bash in that case. We really don’t want devs fighting over which shell to install on the servers, but everyone can go crazy on their own laptops.

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

#224

Post by christophilus »

aerique wrote: post #159
j1elo wrote: post #107

Thinking this is so cool! I was wondering if seriously buying into an alternate shell like this would be worth it in the long run. Would really love to read from people who use(d) an alternative shell, both success and failure stories. I cannot shake from my head the idea that buying into a non-standard shell will only work for personal projects in one's own workstation, but it won't fly too far for company work beca…

I don't know if fish counts as an alternative shell since it is still pretty close to bash and zsh, just with better defaults requiring less configuration (similar to i3wm with respect to "better defaults"). I just use it as interactive shell and for scripts I use `/bin/sh`. So I don't really run into a lot of problems, only sometimes with scripts that do not have a proper `#!/path/to/shell` declaration at the top. (…

I’ve been poking around with Sway, coming from Gnome (which I mostly love). What got you into i3 vs a normal desktop, and how long did it take you to realize it was a good fit?

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

#225

Post by rincebrain »

Macha wrote: post #204
rincebrain wrote: post #14

This feels extremely like PowerShell, from all the examples, and even cites "draws inspiration from projects like PowerShell", so "a new type of shell" feels very disingenuous unless it has additional novel properties that aren't evident just from these. There's also no support for variables yet if the page is to be believed, which means there's 0 chance of me using this for more than 5 minutes right now. (I'm not tr…

I think to most people who've only used as Powershell as "That windows shell with the blue background and built in unixy aliases", getting into Powershell itself still qualifies as a "new type of shell", so I'm willing to extend that credit to other shells trying the same paradigm.

I'd agree that getting into PS from cmd counts as a new paradigm, or that getting into Nushell without Powershell experience is as well (based on the examples), but at the point where PS has been shipped with Windows by default for many years now, and Nushell runs natively on Windows, I think it's reasonable to disagree with a claim of "a new kind of shell".

I also think it's reasonable for people to say it's justified - there's certainly, as you and others have remarked, a decent argument to be made for that.

But for me, "different from many common shells, but all the same functionality has been bundled in one shell before"* strongly violates my expectations for "new kind of shell".

* - I am not trying to definitively state they have no new functionality, I absolutely have not dug in deep enough, just that I did not see any examples of it, which I would have expected prominently.

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

#226

Post by IggleSniggle »

hibbelig wrote: post #205
maccard wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not really supposed to write scripts for fish Given that 95% of my time in a shell is running a script, a shell that doesn't do that well isn't a great fit for me. > A shebang on the top of your script will invoke the script with the right executable, Assuming the person who wrote it had the foresight to do so. That person isn't always me, and if I have to manually check if each script I run has a shebang, I…

I haven’t seen a shell script in ages that was missing the shebang. Is this common in some places? I’ve started to write dash scripts because that seems to be reasonably posix and bash on macOS is ancient.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a script written without the shebang.

Btw, you can get around the ancient bash in macOS by installing a more modern bash and invoking with /usr/bin/env bash as your shebang. Not sure if that’s a great idea, mind you, but if you’re already writing scripts in something non-portable, it’s an option.

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

#227

Post by salmo »

maccard wrote: post #133
j1elo wrote: post #107

Thinking this is so cool! I was wondering if seriously buying into an alternate shell like this would be worth it in the long run. Would really love to read from people who use(d) an alternative shell, both success and failure stories. I cannot shake from my head the idea that buying into a non-standard shell will only work for personal projects in one's own workstation, but it won't fly too far for company work beca…

I tried fish for a while. The differing syntax between fish and bash for fundamental things mean I was running all my scripts through bash anyway, and if I wanted to share them/use them elsewhere in the company it had to be bash, so I swapped back to bash.

That's not entirely weird to me.

For the longest time bash was in various states of disrepair on different Unixes. I could make it segfault pretty easily.

I wrote scripts that had to run across Linux, BSD, HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX at the time. So we relied on a ksh88 implementation on each. Whether it was AT&T, mksh, or pdksh, it was fine. Couldn't rely on 93isms, but basically anything POSIX was cool.

I used ksh93 interactively for the longest time. But then Linuxes stopped testing interactive use w/ their packages and it became unusable (looking at you RedHat). So I used bash interactively but still wrote those ksh scripts.

These days, I use zsh locally on MacOS and BSD, but mostly write bash scripts for those and Linux. I still stick to the POSIX habits I have for portability. But the variances are so less. The only one that annoys me is the "does sed -i do in-place" game.

I don't think my interactive shell and target scripting shell have ever matched 1:1 in feature set. And what I slap together interactively or for 1-off script, I would never do for a "real" script. And that's a thing that bugs me with a lot of shell scripts I see in the wild.

A "real" script should make very little assumptions, fail safely, be low on resource utilization to not risk impacting a business workload, and be maintainable. I write everything real like it might be run thousands of times accross thousands of hosts. Even when I didn't intend for it to be, I've caught it in the wild because someone borrowed what I did.

I do love shellcheck, because it teaches our newer folks good habits and they're used to that kind of feedback in other languages. It catches so many things that make me cringe. It's not perfect, of course, but pretty great.

When I started out, I worked 9-6 and the Unix sages in my group worked later hours. So they'd walk through my work on the RCS host and I'd come into the morning with a critique in my email. If I didn't understand, I could hit their desk after lunch and they would patiently explain to me. I love them for it, but it is nice to have tools without a 24-hour feedback loop.

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

#228

Post by andredz »

thatsnotmepls wrote: post #197
cbolton wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

It wasn't clear to me that any of the interpretations was, well… clear, and had to check the comments (I could have checked the repo too).

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

#229

Post by mattbee »

rincebrain wrote: post #14

This feels extremely like PowerShell, from all the examples, and even cites "draws inspiration from projects like PowerShell", so "a new type of shell" feels very disingenuous unless it has additional novel properties that aren't evident just from these. There's also no support for variables yet if the page is to be believed, which means there's 0 chance of me using this for more than 5 minutes right now. (I'm not tr…

I came here to say something similar. The question I need answered in the README is - why would I invest time in learning this instead of Powershell?

My muscle memory for bash is pretty strong, but when I have to do Windowsy stuff, I end up picking up a little bit more Powershell each time and find it pretty neat.

So I'd be interested to know what it does differently, and couldn't find that answer.

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

#230

Post by pdpi »

kamray23 wrote: post #187
pdpi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is perfectly happy to leak memory. Leaks are not considered unsafe. There was actually a bit of a reckoning around the 1.0 release where people widely assumed the language wouldn’t leak, and leaks were proven to be safe behaviour.

Oh? Perhaps I need to reconsider my past trust in Rust. In retrospect it makes sense, interop. without leaking memory would be damn near impossible. Still, I expect it to be very hard to do accidentally. In C all you need to do is have your mind blank for a moment. Which isn't that uncommon, especially if you're on crunch or something.

So there's two things to talk about here.

First, the language can't save you from getting the program semantics wrong (e.g. if you never delete an entry from a hashmap even after you're done with it, you're leaking that memory). No language can save you from leaks as a general concept.

Second, Rust makes a very specific promise — freedom from data races. Leaking resources does not actually break that promise, because it doesn't allow you to access that resource any more.

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