I used zsh for gosh, over 15 years probably now. I swapped to fish at the start of this year on a bit of a whim (new year, new computer, new ~~me~~ shell).
It's pretty good in a "gets out of the way" kind of way, and the `abbr` feature is preferred over aliases but it has some annoying quirks like no dictionary type, the inability to "background blocks of code", requiring spawning a subshell + string which has other issues and in a way it feels sort of stuck between being new and friendly but still carrying over enough baggage to be annoying in other ways.
I tried Nushell a week or so ago and after getting my head around it (and $it and $in, haha) I think it feels like the future. It's not quite there ergonomically in some ways eg: reedline can't edit the current command line, but it's quite close.
What really sold me on it was when I
- Had a flat text file of "url\nartist\ntitle"
- Had to download these urls and insert the artist & title into a database
and I realised I could do it all with Nu primitives,
open new-landings.txt
| lines
| each { $in | str trim}
| chunks 3
| each {{title: $in.0, artist: $in.1, url: $in.2}}
| enumerate
| par-each {
http get ($in.item.url | str replace large medium) | save $"landing-($in.index + 101).jpg"
# also insert artist title into database
run-app ... etc
}
Now, could you do the same thing with zsh/bash/sh? Yep. Some kind of awk/sed thing with xargs I would guess. But I'd have to look it up. With Nu, after a few hours of playing with it I already "knew" how to do it. That felt really powerful.
For reference, I also tried Murex and Elvish. Elvish doesn't support ctrl-z, so its disqualified right there though I like the syntax. Murex seemed fine but Nu was bigger with wider support. I think I saw Nu had pattern matching and it immediately got a big desirability bump.
I remember seeing another comment, wishing we had STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR and STDDATA, maybe one day.
I suspect most of the current coding assistants would have been able to do that for you in most languages, including something more portable and easier to maintain like Python.
It's pretty good in a "gets out of the way" kind of way, and the `abbr` feature is preferred over aliases but it has some annoying quirks like no dictionary type, the inability to "background blocks of code", requiring spawning a subshell + string which has other issues and in a way it feels sort of stuck between being new and friendly but still carrying over enough baggage to be annoying in other ways.
I tried Nushell a week or so ago and after getting my head around it (and $it and $in, haha) I think it feels like the future. It's not quite there ergonomically in some ways eg: reedline can't edit the current command line, but it's quite close.
What really sold me on it was when I
- Had a flat text file of "url\nartist\ntitle"
- Had to download these urls and insert the artist & title into a database
and I realised I could do it all with Nu primitives,
Now, could you do the same thing with zsh/bash/sh? Yep. Some kind of awk/sed thing with xargs I would guess. But I'd have to look it up. With Nu, after a few hours of playing with it I already "knew" how to do it. That felt really powerful.For reference, I also tried Murex and Elvish. Elvish doesn't support ctrl-z, so its disqualified right there though I like the syntax. Murex seemed fine but Nu was bigger with wider support. I think I saw Nu had pattern matching and it immediately got a big desirability bump.
I remember seeing another comment, wishing we had STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR and STDDATA, maybe one day.