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

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.

Why not both? I use starship and fzf with a fish shell.

Fzf is a great productivity boost, especially because it integrates with everything so well. Starship is... nice and flashy, but I don't think it actually improves my productivity a lot. The biggest feature for me is giving me the current git branch, and I used to do it with my fish theme. I mean it's nice to know what version of Python I have currently, it's just not a killer feature.

I switched my shell to pwsh a few years back when work had me doing heavy pwsh development. It worked, but…

1. It didn’t execute native commands directly, at least then, so I was cobbling together pwsh functions to imitate ls, etc.

2. The pipeline is awesome, but incompatible with the default UNIX/style, where commands produce and expect text.

Having said all of that, it worked and worked well, at least for my purposes (immersion and education).

The pwsh pipeline is far more powerful, esp. since it passes objects and can maintain those: command B can perform work on the results of command A and C can access the results of both A and B with relative ease. The same trick is possible in bash, e.g., but requires some funky redirect and pipe management.

One the pwsh work was done, I switched back to bash.

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

Albeit this task needn't involve a shell at all - just `find` and `rename`:

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

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.