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

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

#91

Post by oblio »

ripley12 wrote: post #90
oblio wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is nushell for interactive use? Prompt configuration, stuff like that? Also, how stable is it? Especially when interacting with weirder stuff like tmux, vim, ncurses apps?

I would say interactive use is good. Not hard to configure prompts. Stability (in the sense of not crashing) is decent, it's been a long time since I've crashed Nushell. We do get the occasional crashing bug filed but most of those are in areas like our completion engine rather than interacting with external tools. OTOH, command design and language are not entirely stable; we are still pre-1.0 and we do make breaking…

> (I work on Nushell)

Ooooh! Awesome! Thank you for your great work, I'd have 2 big questions:

1. Do you have any visibility into when things should stabilize enough for a 1.0 release? 1 year? 5 years? Impossible to say?

2. And the be-all-end-all of Linux distro packaging, Debian. Any plans to include it into Debian? Usually when this happens the package propagates to many, many downstream distributions, such as Ubuntu & family.

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

#92

Post by ripley12 »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #83

Given that Fish is switching to Rust, I'm considering Fish as my alternate shell. I've tried many, but I always end up going back to Bash. Is there any reason why you think Fish isn't enough, and you're looking at super-niche ones?

I spent 3 years using Fish before switching back to zsh (and later Nushell, which I ended up working on).

Fish is a wonderful, mature project, but for me it wasn't quite ambitious enough. It breaks from POSIX just often enough to cause friction when adapting instructions written for POSIX shells, but not enough to make CLI UX significantly better than a POSIX shell. Also, scripting often seems like an afterthought in Fish.

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

#94

Post by mk12 »

petepete wrote: post #86
jnsaff2 wrote: post #32

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

I use one fish plugin and it's a total gamechanger https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish Being able to instantly fuzzy find files, directories, git history, processes, environment variables and command history is like having a superpower.

Shameless plug for my plugin https://github.com/mk12/fish-fzf:

> Unlike the others, this plugin tries to pack as much as possible into a single "do what I mean" shortcut. Edit a file? cd to a directory? Just insert it into the command line? Many things like this can be determined from context.

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

#95

Post by cassepipe »

sureste wrote: post #89

I've used Fish for about 2 years now. Before that I used ZSH for about 6 months. I'm relatively new daily driving Linux. About 3 years. The thing about ZSH that made me jump ship was that even though you can customize it like fish (with Oh My ZSH plugins) ZSH was always slow or didn't display some things correctly. It was frustrating having to wait a few seconds for a command or having things just not work out correc…

Let's add to that that both fish and zsh have excellent vi modes (unlike readline's half-assed one) (If don't see the benefit of using a vim mode for the command line, you probably still reaching far out to the top left corner escape key in the rare occasions you do use vim, and dislike to use it.)

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

#96

Post by ripley12 »

oblio wrote: post #91
ripley12 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say interactive use is good. Not hard to configure prompts. Stability (in the sense of not crashing) is decent, it's been a long time since I've crashed Nushell. We do get the occasional crashing bug filed but most of those are in areas like our completion engine rather than interacting with external tools. OTOH, command design and language are not entirely stable; we are still pre-1.0 and we do make breaking…

> (I work on Nushell) Ooooh! Awesome! Thank you for your great work, I'd have 2 big questions: 1. Do you have any visibility into when things should stabilize enough for a 1.0 release? 1 year? 5 years? Impossible to say? 2. And the be-all-end-all of Linux distro packaging, Debian. Any plans to include it into Debian? Usually when this happens the package propagates to many, many downstream distributions, such as Ubun…

I'm not sure when we'll be ready for 1.0 (at which point we will commit to stability in the language etc.), but I would guess 1-2 years based on the work we want to do and the pace of contributions.

Not sure about Debian. We generally rely on the community for distro packaging. Right now Homebrew is the easiest way to install Nu on most Linux distros.

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

#98

Post by kstrauser »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #88
DiabloD3 wrote: post #83

Given that Fish is switching to Rust, I'm considering Fish as my alternate shell. I've tried many, but I always end up going back to Bash. Is there any reason why you think Fish isn't enough, and you're looking at super-niche ones?

Funny I'm considering switching off fish for that exact reason. I figure it will be stuck in place for years during the rewrite, and may never release another major version.

They’re not doing a full rewrite from scratch, but an incremental replacement.

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

#99

Post by nurspouse »

I've been using xonsh professionally since around 2018 - in both Windows and Linux. Love it. Getting it to run existing bash scripts was a pain earlier on, but has gotten much better.

The one thing I don't do is make it my official shell in Linux. I keep bash/zsh as my shell, but the first thing I do in any shell is launch xonsh. Occasionally it does crash and it's nice to end up in a "backup" shell in case I need to recover anything.

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