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Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
121 points by oblio on Feb 9, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 141 comments
Hello folks,

People using alternative shells (oil shell, nu shell, etc) as daily drivers, how is your daily experience?

I'm talking about a professional work experience, i.e. you use the shell as your daily driver at your workplace, not just for playing around.

Fish is probably usable, but outside of fish, is there any other production-ready alternative shell?




I use `fish` as my main shell. It's closer to POSIX than eshell or oil, but it's definitely not POSIX.

Personally, the main thing I like about it is that I can't copy paste bash commands. It forces me to read and understand and then convert. It also has some quality of life stuff I really like. I think next time I'm just going to go back to ZSH though as I feel I have learnt enough from the experience of using it that I'm no longer getting new things out of it, and I don't script in fish enough for the nicer syntax to be beneficial enough for me. Honestly, I prefer ZSH variables over fish variables too


Another fish user reporting in.

I don't care too much about bash compatibility. I don't even care shell scripting in my shell - when I need to write a script I write a sh script (or python for more complex ones). I just want a shell that's easy to use and user friendly.

For some reason none of the other alternative shells "click" for me - I love the idea of having objects in my shell (like in nushell, or powershell), but all the implementations I've tried are just clumsy to use and get in the way. Whereas fish is awesome and works out of the box - barely need for any configuration/


Also a fish user, the lack of bash compatibility if required is easily fixed by bash -c, or just dump it into a script with a bash shebang but most simple one liners can easily be tinkered with to make it fish compatible - case in point `for` which just needs an end in most cases


I've been using fish for at least a decade. While I can't simply run bash commands, I can easily drop to a bash shell and run anything.

The defaults and features are great.

Scripts I also write in bash, sh, or python for compatibility. It's not much of an issue.

I do remember something that used to break in my setup, but since I'm always in tmux, instead of changing the default shell (chsh -s), I just set the default for tmux to be fish.

    # set shell
    set -g default-shell /usr/local/bin/fish


I use fish too. My favourite feature is typing part of a command and using up and down arrows to cycle through the results, as opposed to ctrl+R and...I don't remember which one. Functions are easy to define too.


You can easily get bash to do that by adding these lines to your .inputrc file.

  "\e[A": history-search-backward
  "\e[B": history-search-forward
  "\e[C": forward-char
  "\e[D": backward-char


Most things in fish can be achieved with customization and configuration in other shells, like zsh or bash.

The point of fish is a sane set of defaults that doesn't require customization and is good enough.


Best feature of fish is the fact that my fish dotfiles are about 100loc max with a fully async prompt.

Comparable functionality in zsh would be 500loc of ultra obscure tweaks :)


What do you mean by "fully async prompt"?


https://github.com/mattgreen/lucid.fish

It avoids pauses when doing `git status` on gigantic repos.


They are explicitly against configuration options though. Good luck if their opinions about what's sane doesn't match your own. By the way I have that feature in zsh myself. Quite useful.


> Good luck if their opinions about what's sane doesn't match your own.

Thank you, and yes, that's when you don't use fish.

The point of fish is being for people who are fine with the defaults set by the authors. It's the core selling point.


If you want zsh that acts like fish, try "fizsh".


That is so cool, people really think of everything don't they?


I checked fizsh out and the installation on Ubuntu was broken (from the package in the repo), the last commit to the repo was in 2016... It seemed promising at first but these things are all about continued investment and maintenance.


Not wrong, but fish is so nice because it just works without any configuration. Sane defaults are a blessing.

I just checked and the only things I have configured are `set fish_greeting` (i.e. empty) and some paths...

Edit: Also, I don't know how, but the fish completion is magic. It seems to remember which commands I use often in which folders and in which order. I'm not sure if that's how it's implemented. Sure feels that way though.


> It seems to remember which commands I use often in which folders and in which order. I'm not sure if that's how it's implemented. Sure feels that way though.

Check ~/.local/share/fish/fish_history!


Fish shell search and suggestions are awesome, and not comparable to what readline gives you. I don't know how it does that, but the shell understands the concept of files, commands in PATH, and CWD. So depending on the directory you are in, after typing "vim " you will get different suggestions (completable by right arrow). Somehow it knows what I mean 80% of the time.


Nice to know!

Nonetheless, what moved me from bash to fish was having this as granted. Now I worry only about specific higher-level functions. Also hunting each of these optimizations distracts me from my task at hand.

There's other stuff as well, for instance I'm abusing `for` iterations a lot more to run the same command for lists of things. Using bash before was less ergonomic and painful.


You need to restart bash to make this work. Cool.


ctrl+R and...you keep pushing it to go back in time. In case anyone needs to know.


Yup i've used fish too for many years because of it's excellent autocomplete. It's occasionally frustrating when you have to paste a bash command in, but if it doesn't work you can just spawn bash to run the command.


It's gradually got more bash compatibility, with things like X=Y run-command, &&/|| as aliases for and/or, $() expansion, changes to * to match more items. I don't think it's impossible that a future edition of fish starts to support e.g. export or a subset of bash conditionals.


I'm fairly sure export is already supported, but I could be missing something.


When there's something called deadline that's no longer feasible


    bash -c "" # to run some bash inline
or just

    bash -l # to jump to a bash shell
And that's not really a deadline issue. Sounds more of a planning one or an issue of not knowing your tools.


It's GNU deadline


I've been using nushell for the past year, and I love it.

For a while I kept bash as my login shell and had nu as my default command in tmux. This had the advantage of allowing a bunch of environment setup to run in bash and get inherited, which allowed my overall setup to be more vanilla (and also nushell doesn't have any kind of job control, so something like tmux is probably a must).

About two months ago I promoted nushell to my login shell. In hindsight that was probably more trouble than it's worth, but I have no intention of changing back.

I now keep a very minimal bash config (~10 lines total) for when I inevitably need to shell into it for some reason. That doesn't happen very often, though — a quick look at my bash history shows that I'm mostly either running stuff interactively which assumes bash, or using it as a repl while working on scripts.

I wouldn't recommend nushell to anyone without a decent background wrangling posix shells, because that's not going anywhere. I've had to reverse engineer a bunch of shell integrations for things like package and version managers, most of which assume bash/zsh/fish.

I don't resent any of that work, because I'm in my shell all day, and the expressive power of nushell is so far ahead of other shells for the kinds of tasks that I'm doing in that environment. I won't try to convince anyone of this, since the question was about suitability for daily use. If you're into it, you're into it.

I'll just add that nushell in particular rewards daily use, because as a language for writing your own custom commands, it has a way of quickly building momentum once you get going.


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 changes fairly often.

(I work on Nushell)


Thank you! I've been using Nushell for a couple of weeks and at this point I don't see myself going back. Modern configuration. Great interactive usage (structured data, mostly!). I thought I'd like it, but more so than expected so far. The one shortcoming I've encountered so far is that some built-in functions seem to buffer all their input before producing any output, meaning I can't e.g. tail + filter logs. A fairly simple example:

    journalctl -xefu systemd-networkd-wait-online.service | lines | filter {|in| $in =~ 'start'}
only produces output when I interrupt (ctrl+c). Is this expected?


Ahh, streaming. This is an area I've been working on; there are still lots of places where we collect data when we should stream it instead. In general, if you think "that should be able to stream" but it doesn't, that's probably a bug and worth filing an issue.

I can reproduce your issue, I suspect that `filter` is collecting its input when it shouldn't. It's not totally clear why from looking at the code.

If you can file an issue that would be appreciated, if not I'll try to do so later today. We have a tag for streaming issues: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A...


Thanks for the reply. Upon further inspection, it looks like it's `lines`. It might also be `filter` but I haven't quickly come up with a way to determine whether that's the case. I opened an issue:

https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/8016

I couldn't apply labels myself, I don't think.


> (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.


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.


> How is nushell for interactive use? Prompt configuration, stuff like that?

Prompt configuration is good... you define commands for the left and right prompt, as well as variables for vi mode indicators (the line editor's vi mode is mostly complete, I'm happy with it). You can also set the cursor shape based on vi mode. Also https://starship.rs works well.

There are hooks for running commands on events like changes to environment variables, which is how you implement support for things like version managers (i.e. on change to $PWD, run whatever).

Nushell parses pipelines upfront, so the error messages are often very precise and useful, and arrive before any damage has been done. This is fundamentally different to how you might expect pipelines to work, so its difficult to compare like for like (... it's great, though).

There's a built in fuzzy finder for commands, completions and history, as well as the line editor visually showing matches against partial commands (a trend which I think started with fish). I do miss some of the history search magic that's possible with zsh plugins — specifically using vi movements to incrementally match more of those visual completions from history.

Completions for external programs have gotten good. If you set up carapace as a completion provider, then most things on the happy path work well (based on bash completions). Edge cases can be understandably buggy... I've noticed that completions for aliases are a bit unpredictable, but I haven't looked into it enough to know whether this is nushell or carapace.

Finally, the automatic generation of help and completions for nushell commands (including your own custom commands) is excellent and one of my favourite features. I'd encourage anyone to look up the docs for custom commands.

> Also, how stable is it? Especially when interacting with weirder stuff like tmux, vim, ncurses apps?

I use tmux and vim, and I've had almost no issues. The only thing that comes to mind is the lack of job control, which means you need to remap ctrl-z to stop vim from getting into a weird state where it can't actually background itself.

Another thing (which isn't nushell's fault at all) is if you change your default shell, many programs will expect that to correspond to a posix shell. For example, after changing my login shell I had to run around explicitly setting my shell to bash in a bunch of places, including vim.

Also every now and then I'll find another oddball command that acts up. For example I noticed that `go test ./...` didn't work without quoting the (admittedly strange) `./...` argument. Later it started working without the quotes after a nushell update, but that's the kind of thing to watch out for.

And another kind of stability: nushell has regular breaking changes. I think this is fine, because it's a fast-moving project which I'm only using locally, and this allows it to evolve quickly (I get excited to read the change notes). But this does make it harder for people who are trying to support nushell from their projects... and so I think naturally the responsibility to keep anything working has to lie with the user. If you are comfortable with that (which I am) then I think it's a good deal.


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.


I'm sorry but obviously you had to learn how to use nushell but you didn't learn how to use find (you don't need xargs) or bash (you don't need find).

Your first problem solved in bash:

    shopt -s globstar
    for f in ./**/data.json; do mv "$f" "${f%json}yml"; done
You can do it without globstar (without running into weird issues with newlines) like so:

    find . -name data.json -print0 | while read -rd '' f; do mv "$f" "${f%json}yml"; done
Now, since the particular problem doesn't require a shell at all, you can solve it entirely in find:

    find . -name data.json -execdir mv {} data.yml \;
Your second example would be:

    (
        cd "$(which npm.ps1)" && \
        for f in *.ps1; do printf "alias %s='powershell.exe %s'\n" "${f%.ps1}" "$f"; done
    ) >file


I didn't learn Bash from scratch. I just serach Google/StackOverflow for similar questions.

But that is the point, there are too many commands to do the same job in Bash, each with dozens of flags. It is hard to learn them all, or even find the right command (like shopt, read) or flag (like -rd, print0, -execdir) in the first place.

That's why Nutshell will be simpler for small tasks.


No, the point is that if you go into a discussion saying: "X is better than Y but I should warn you that I never bothered learning Y but instead spent my time learning X" your ability to provide an accurate comparison is already put into question.

Then you go on and provide examples of extremely sub-optimal Y code and compare it to X code you wrote.

It's very uncharitable and very difficult to tell what is actually better. It doesn't matter if X or Y is better at this point because you haven't provided a fair comparison. And while I agree that bash is shit, I need a lot more than "here's some poorly written bash code compared to nushell" to persuade me to switch to something less ubiquitous.

Since bash and presumably nushell are both turing complete, there should be an infinite number of ways of achieving any task, what you want to compare is the shortest but so short that they're difficult to comprehend solutions, and there aren't that many. I can't tell if you picked the most idiomatic nushell solutions to your problems but I can definitely tell you didn't do the same for bash.

If you're happy to use nushell you would probably be happy to enable globstar in your shell. So my first solution would be comparable to your nushell version. And yes, you need to know what globstar is, just like you would need to know what nushell is.

Given that bash and presumably nushell both support running arbitrary commands the find version is actually shell independent and the fact that you don't know how to use find isn't bash's problem.

Let's put it this way, given I don't know nushell, I would also have to learn the iterator, lambda, and variable substitution syntax (each, ||, $v.name). I know how equivalents of those features work in bash (for, $...). I don't find your code any easier to read by default (without having to make guesses as to how nushell works). If I claimed right now that I find nushell syntax to be confusing, weird and unusual, would you think it would be fair for me to say that based on reading only your code?


You miss the part about them saying that the code is from stackoverflow so in other words not exactly hacked together.

Overall I agree with both of you but on different points, she'll scripting is an outdated painful process and yes we should provide optimal answers to be fair.


I don't think the code presented was taken directly from stackoverflow, and I don't think that's what the person I replied to said. That being said, even if it was from stackoverflow, stackoverflow is a poor resource for older languages/environments. There's still a major focus on points over quality answers and you get lots of bad advice from there.


> Now, since the particular problem doesn't require a shell at all, you can solve it entirely in find: find . -name data.json -execdir mv {} data.yml \;

How do you do that without a shell?


I mean obviously you need some way of executing the command and you're probably not going to write a C program to call execve to do it, but the point is that it doesn't involve any shell features and aside from the escape syntax for the semicolon is completely shell independent.


IIRC running a command without piping/string semantics doesn't involve a shell, such as os.system() in python and child_process.exec() in Node.js.


> 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 {} +


Do you really have rename on your computer? What OS is this?


I'm not op but I do have `rename` in my computer. I'm using latest fedora linux.

It seems to be included with the util-linux package

https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/util-linux/util-linu...


In zsh you can use:

  for f in **/data.json; mv $f $f:r.yaml
Which is even shorter, and easier. In bash you need a bit more syntax:

  for f in **/data.json; do mv $f ${f%.json}.yaml; done
That second example can probably also be simplified a lot in a similar fashion.


In the mid-90s, I used Byron Rakitzis' implementation of Plan 9's rc shell. I used it at work on SunOS 4.x. It was most excellent when I was able to have a meticulously-arranged, bespoke environment of startup and utility scripts around it. The scripting/programming language it incorporates is elegant, and simple, yet powerful, just like a utopian sort of environment envisioned by the Plan 9/Bell Labs folks.

Chris Siebenmann still uses rc, to the best of my knowledge. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WhyISwitchedTo... He's not a poster to HN, AFAIK, but his blog is frequently featured here. I'm not sure whether he's amenable to sharing his configuration and utility scripts, but if you're at all interested, it's worth asking him, I would suppose.


I too used Byron's rc shell for many years. "Elegant, simple, and powerful" describes it well. I only gave it up as my daily driver after getting spoiled by ever improving bash tab completion at a time when rc didn't have it. Still use it for shell scripting when I don't want to deal with quoting hassles due to strings/filenames potentially containing white space.


I used rc for my utility scripts in the past, but an incompatibility between two different rc implementations caused one of my scripts to delete all my files instead of the folder that I wanted to delete. Apparently the plan9port version uses a different parser from the Plan 9 version, and is also incompatible with rakitzis' version.


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


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.


Sure, I too use fish as I wrote in the original post.

Starship gives me quite a bit of situational awareness:

- git status, with branch, uncommited stuff, all that

- my python venv I'm in, not just the system python version

- my aws profile active

- etc

Forgot to add zoxide [0] and ripgrep [1].

[0] https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

[1] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep


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.


Trying out various shells (and converting my various scripts) has been somewhat of a hobby of mine for the past several weeks. Long story short, I settled on using fish both as my shell and as the language to write my scripts in.

nushell is really, really great as a shell but I find it far too limiting in some cases to use as a scripting language. For example, you can't build a non-external command from a string and run that command. I'll definitely come back to nushell in the future.

elvish is also really great, especially as a scripting language (being able to pass around lambdas is amazing), but ultimately fish has so much community support and so many nice plugins that it's hard to justify using anything else at the moment.


I’ve used fish for years at work but that’s mostly a personal choice similar to your preferred editor. It’s more productive, but nobody else really sees it.

What’s helped a lot more has been replacing shell scripts with Python once they hit a certain complexity level. Huge reduction in code size, better functionality (e.g. it’s trivial to have good CLI argument parsing so people actually add it), and every time a large bash script has been converted some set of error-handling bugs has been fixed.


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.


I'm a Linux native guy and I haven't hardly touched Windows in years but I still find myself curious about PowerShell. Is PowerShell even remotely suitable as a Linux shell? Is there any hope for PowerShell on Linux, it's an interesting take on shells.


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.


I have been using Powershell, primarily on Windows, as my primary shell for a few years. I honestly prefer it to bash. I don't set it as my default shell on Linux, but that's because 99% of my bash usage (and the majority of my Linux usage) these days is explicitly to test a piece of code written in bash.

Configured with PSReadline Emacs mode it really feels pretty much like bash for the most part, except better. https://github.com/lukeschlather/dotfiles/blob/master/src/Wi...

(Concrete better: copy-paste, selecting with the mouse, scrolling all just work. Copy-paste pastes multiline by default so you don't end up executing commands without a chance to review.)

I've been wanting to try out elvish which seems like it might be a cleaner and more "unixy" pwsh. https://elv.sh/


nushell has a similar philosophy to PowerShell but without the strange command names. PowerShell is probably tied too deeply to Windows and .NET to be suitable as a Linux shell


PowerShell has strange command names? Compared to what? grep, sed, awk, and a bunch of two letter abbreviations from the before-times?


Compared to what the majority of people who frequently use the terminal are used to.


It’s different so it’s bad. /s


I use Powershell as standard shell on WSL (Linux on Windows) Everything is the same as Windows


I decided last year to bite the bullet and learn Powershell. I think I will no longer have to wonder if there is a better option anymore.


What makes it good?


1. Piping object instead of string. This is what Powershell inspire other new generation shells.

2. .NET integration

3. Maintained by a large company. Extensively used in commercial.


To elaborate on "piping object instead of a string" Powershell just has lots of quality-of-life features. I think the fundamental problem these days with the shell "do one thing and do it well" concept is that nothing in traditional posix outputs structured data, so every single command and script is a mess of cobbled-together ad hoc parsers and sorters. In Powershell all the builtins emit structured data so there's no need to, for example, write a regex to parse out the mtime of a file. You just do `$file.LastWriteTime`.


It’s pretty fantastic, the trouble is finding a tutorial which isn’t a blog post that was written in the early 2000s using outdated syntax.


I use elvish[0] and have been using it as my main shell for the last 2 years. I like the focus on datastructures and flows (such as exceptions).

It is mature enough for me, and I have found that the nuance of having non-posix compatibility in some things doesn't annoy me as much as when I hit a problem that is too small to write python and to complex for bash.

Community is great, and I always find the answer to my problems in either the chat or other code samples.

[0] Elvish webpage: https://elv.sh/


I am a fish fan… but even fish has some difficulties, as many scripts and tools in the wild expect a bash-compatible shell. Otherwise, it is excellent and I use it on my computers 100% of time.

I guess other alternative shells like nu have about the same level of usability. If you like them, you can use them.


I use fish also but still default to bash and run fish manually when I log in. Then if I am trying to paste a command and it doesn't work right, I just type exit and run it in bash.


Probably best to use it as your interactive shell and still have bash or some other POSIX shell for scripts, unless they're intended for your personal use.


Xonsh works pretty great. I've used it as a daily driver in the past but am trying out oh-my-zsh right now. Pathlib (and pathlib.glob) are pretty amazing, and python syntax is great for a shell.

https://xon.sh/


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 correctly.

Fish, on the other hand, is fast and has a lot of quality of life features like typing part of a command and then serach with the up key. I didn't even install any plugins (I like to Fisher[1]).

Also, Fish has gotten me more and more into shell scripting. The docs for Fish are very clear and easy to navigate. I love how you can have custom scripts on the .config folder or abbreviations[2], which I think are superior to aliases since they expand into the command you're calling.

I was using it as the default shell for my user until recently and it was fine, but I have gone back to Bash as my default shell and just set my terminal emulator to start into Fish on startup. I didn't have any incident. I just wanted to avoid anything unexpected further down the line.

[1]: https://github.com/jorgebucaran/fisher

[2]: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/interactive.html#abbrevia...


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.)


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.


I'm using Fish for years, tried Nushell recently, but it didn't click for me. While I like the principle of data being more than just plain text, it probably was just too alien to me.

A few here said they don't use Fish or another shell due to compatibility issues, but I wonder what the problem is: If I want to use a script written for another (POSIX) shell, it most likely has a shebang (or I can add it), so it will get properly executed using that other shell…


Mostly it's because you can't copy and paste stuff from blogs or Stack Overflow.


but you can just run `bash`, paste the command, and then `exit`?


I use eshell for most things, but I do have to occasionally pop open an ansi-term.


At work, I would use the workplace standard, for easy sharing and interop with colleagues and systems. Work scripting has been Bash because that's been the default (so far).

Personally, Bash is stuck to my fingers out of habit.

I tend to write my scripts in a Functional Programming style, which plays well with stdio and pipes, and makes for composable and testable code.

Like this: https://www.evalapply.org/tags/bash/

edit: add reference


Oilshell (osh, not oil) is supposed to be backwards compatible. Not really using it, mostly because I can't remember to and I don't want to set it as default yet.


I use yash personally (https://yash.osdn.jp/), but I'm not sure if that counts as 'alternative' since it's POSIX-compliant. It's small, interactivity-friendly, and POSIX compliant all at the same time, which is something that other shells can't match.


I was very happy with zsh and fish when I was at small companies or grad school.

Now I work at Google where there are tons of shared bash commands and scripts. It's so easy to simply copy/paste something that works into your shell instead of futzing around with compatibility differences.

It'd be neat to work at a place where everyone used fish but I've never experienced that.


It's easy, you can just add bash to the beginning of the code and you can run the same script there.


Ya but stuff like fzf and .bashrc it's just easier to use what everyone else has


I would probably turn that around and ask why are you asking?

Outside of command line editing features, some kind of completion, novelties, and prettiness, I think most of the time it always comes back to "I chose this shell due to syntax, or programming of some kind". e.g. tcsh due to the C-ness of it.

I am writing this from Linux, been using csh on Solaris and then bash on linux since, well since back then... I have seen a lot of shells come out, but every time I switch to one I think about my personal needs in the shell and portability (I do manage a large number of boxes, and most of them do not have extra items installed, including shells) so I end up back at bash/dash/sh.

Again, I would ask myself what you need in the shell. If ZSH or Fish or csh or ksh or some esoteric shell fit the bill, why not just try it as a daily driver? I mean, what is the worst possible outcome? (unless you make a living making life support shell driven software...)


I use zsh, but even zsh is a bit long in the tooth.

I'm especially interested in daily interactive use.

I tried fish but it's a bit tricky in some contexts.

Powershell is a bit too alien in *NIX-land, even though I really like it's concepts.

nushell looks quite promising but it's still pre-1.0.


I think they're all fine (if they claim some sort of stability) with the proviso that you're going to occasionally want to drop into bash or something to check something out before committing it to a script.

(I assume you're talking about interactive use, not using them as the shebang line in your scripts. I wouldn't do that. But mainly just because then you need everyone to agree to install it, or to install it on your servers, etc.)

> Fish is probably usable, but outside of fish

I use fish, have for years, and I say the above to include it. Sometimes I'm not certain something works as I think it does (bash's myriad interpolation/variable manipulation techniques say) and so I switch shell to test it.

It does have bugs and weirdness of course, especially the vi mode, but it's not going to .. idk, rm -rf / when I only told it to rm -rf ~/.cache/* or something.


I've been using fish for a couple years on my work laptops


I was all ready to jump in with nu but I can't live without control-Z and `foo &` :-(

https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/4564#issuecomment-...

And coming back to this after all this time, it seems the nushell issue tracker is not getting groomed at all -- are the authors starting get tired of it? https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/4320 lists a huge number of duplicates.


Try to use it as a daily driver. If you encounter a situation where there's a bug/weirdness/missing feature, you can always temporarily launch bash or whatever to do the one thing you need to do, then exit that (sub)shell and continue with the first one


Im on Nu shell on Windows os. Im very satisfied with it


Bit of a strange one maybe but for my windows machine I've actually been using cmder (conEmu) with ZSH and over the past few years have been extending it with plugins to suit just right.

It's super fast supports everything I need now and couldn't work without it.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but cmder is a terminal emulator not a shell.

Beside this cmder is really great, but recently I switched to MS's own Terminal, which is maybe even better in my opinion. Especially the integrations with wsl2.


Right the shell is zsh integrated into it. I keep associating them together! Should have clarified!

I haven't played with ms' really but interesting the wsl2 integration.. will check it out.


I recently moved from fish to nu. Fish provided the best experience so far. My reasoning for switching to nu is to move closer to a programming language in my shell. Overall, I'm very happy with nu, especially after they added support for direnv.


I personally use ZSH with Prezto, which makes it considerably better than vanilla ZSH. I've tried Nushell and it seems to work quite fine but it's really a different paradigm that makes you think of the data differently than *sh shells.


Yeah, I love some of the ideas of neo-shells but using zsh with oh-my-zsh (mostly because I've used it forever and have too much inertia to switch to prezto/starship) and I get most of those features without losing compatibility with the vast majority of shell scripts, guides or snippets I can find online.


Yeah, I am really excited about Nu as a concept, but I think adoption needs to happen first, where enough people are saying “alright, screw bash script flavors”. I’d feel silly deploying it in a production workload.


How does it compare to oh my zsh?


Anecdote: I started with oh my zsh and moved over to prezto. One thing that immediately struck me with prezto is just how fast it was. The shell boot up was instant, I don't know what oh my zsh was doing but it would take a while before it became interactive.

I didn't care enough to dig deep into the why, but have happily been stuck on prezto for the last few years.


I transitioned from oh-my-zsh to prezto a few years back and really liked it. Equal or better in every way, sometimes much better (speed and customization in particular, prezto is fast and guides you to customize in maintainable ways)


I used ohmyzsh but it somehow got slow, so i switched to zpretzo. It didn't get slow. So that's my comparison :)


I have been using nushell for work for about 4 months, ever since I inherited a windows-only project and was looking for a decent shell experience. I'm not doing any extensive scripting, but I do live in my terminal.

I really like it despite its quirks. I love the implicit $in variable. I find the library easy to understand. I'm only using it interactively so if I have to restart my terminal every once in a while I'm not bothered by it. I trust that those sorts of things will get straightened out --- the git repository is very active.

I saw the maintainers in this thread, so shout out for your good work.


I spend most of my time in #!/bin/ash and while I could install bash on everything using ash reduces my use of bashisms [1]. I stick with ash or sometimes bash so that my skills and habbits albeit not perfect are transferable to any system belonging to almost anyone or any company.

[1] - https://teddit.sethforprivacy.com/r/linux/comments/1h13g8/ba...


I use `xonsh` and it works fine. I'm not sure I'm getting as much benefit out of it as I expected to, so I could probably switch back to `fish` and be pretty happy.


oh-my-zsh on Linux is absolutely great, especially with autosuggestions and syntax-highlighting enabled.

On Windows I've settled with Windows Terminal and clink.

I've tried Powershell too but never got used to it. The concept where everything is an object sounds great. But in practice, to me it only is when scripting. When doing interactive work on the command line (which is what I do all day), as a human, nothing beats plain text for me. Enlighten me if this I missed the point of Powershell.


> Enlighten me if this I missed the point of Powershell.

Plain-text has gotten annoying to me now (having to shell out to grep, cut, and awk is very meh).

What's your pain point when trying to use powershell?


What I feel Powershell does not give: short and simple command names, little syntax, and return values that are interpretable at a glance. And there's muscle memory of course, that's on me!


Every command has a short name.

A handy "punctuations" cheatsheet I found on reddit: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/wp-content/uploads/2015...

Short aliases for all major commands: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/table-of-basic-powe...

Some commands have more than one alias, and you can set your own, of course.

PowerShell also has a very nice help system. For any commands that Microsoft provides, you can type : Get-Help Get-ChildItem

It will list all the various parameters, as well as the various aliases.

As far as return values, you can do $? or type out $LastExitCode - it works the same way you expect.

For a fuller help view you can type "help Get-ChildItem" (all commands and parameters are NOT case-sensitive - it does not care if you type LS or ls, get-childitem vs GET-CHILDITEM does not matter). I prefer this - it helps in remembering.


For me I genuinely think Powershell is fewer keystrokes than the equivalent terse bash. A lot of this is a question of heavily using history and editing old commands rather than writing new ones. And the old commands are legible so it's easy to tweak on the fly. Tab completion/history completion are really powerful. (You do need to enable PSReadline though, which is not out-of-the-box.)


I've used bash/zsh for 20 years and I've been using nushell daily for work and personal projects since I tried it 6 months ago. It's fantastic -- you can do some really novel things that you would never normally do in a shell. But you do have to be prepared to invest some time in learning to do things differently from POSIX shells. The Discord community is very helpful.


Oil is almost there as a daily driver for writing scripts. Main thing holding me back is I can't assume it's installed, unlike bash.


I wish murex got some more love - https://murex.rocks/


Fish is very mature at this point, well supported by other tools (i.e., it's common for the supported shells to be bash, zsh, and fish), and has been inching towards a shallow level of bash compatibility. Its history and suggestion features are also fantastic.


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.


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.


I use fish because it has great defaults, and it is very production ready as a daily driver with scripts mostly as helpers.

I'm very interested in nushell, but haven't tried it yet. It seems to have some similarities with powershell.


bash and zsh are great. I see this "reinventing the wheel" stuff all the time where it's not actually needed if you learn the current tooling well. See this time & time again with SQL.


Add xonsh too, Only Zsh seems to be usable as daily driver. You gotta copy paste some shell script anyways and if the shell is not bash compatible, it's useless


Alternative shells are a hype IMO. I don't need programming in my shell. So I just use bash, and for complicated scripts I just make a python script.


I am still kinda bitter about mac os replacing the default bash with zsh. I gained nothing from that unwanted update, but got compatibility pains suddenly.

Is something is more complicated than a one-liner, use a real programming language instead, with proper building blocks, tooling and documentation. Use something like Go to crosscompile if you don't want to depend on something on the host machine.

In my experience, even very trivial short shell scripts over time tend to grow into a pain, that could totally be avoided when using a real language instead.


Believe the replacement was because bash 4 was GPL3 licensed, and zsh was not. It wasn’t so much for user benefits than it was for security and licensing.


They could have fix the security bugs.


I've watched a one line bash pipeline turn into a thousand line python program over the course of about a week. It didn't need new functionality, it was just not proper engineering to leave it in bash.

We never did agree on whether that was right or not. It was something involving digging information out of elf binaries where the python libs were much more verbose than the flags passed to readelf (maybe objdump, it was a while ago).


subprocess.check_call() is more verbose than bash, but probably a better option.


Does PowerShell counts as alternative? Is wildly different from any POSIX shell, but I use it daily and it's kinda alright.


Bash. Forever.


i know a fair few eshell users. i’m not among them but they’re out there


I'm using zsh, but that hardly counts as alternative


mpsh it's interesting.

https://www.cca.org/mpsh/


(Oil author here) We're making great progress on polishing Oil -- namely semi-automatically translating it to C++ -- but can still use more help.

In particular, starting in October, contributor Melvin Walls has almost single-handedly enabled the interactive shell to be translated, including some of the hardest bits like shell traps, signal handling, and GNU readline bindings.

I was a little worried that we'd run into difficulties with our style of Python and this "inverted" / callback-heavy component, but the result is better than I expected. Melvin came up with creative and solid solutions.

So we have a tiny garbage-collected runtime, and the rest is statically-typed, memory safe Python code. (We learned first hand that memory safety is especially important when you're interfacing with a garbage collector.)

-----

So we need more people who can put in some elbow grease. You can even be paid to work on open source code! We just got a second grant from NLnet, which I mentioned on the blog.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34221617

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/

-----

There are a few misconceptions in this thread which make me realize I need to update the blog:

1) The Oil project contains OSH, which is not only POSIX- compatible, but bash-compatible. Some people don't believe that it could be both things -- how could it be both compatible and new? But that is absolutely true (and a major reason why it's a big project!)

You can type 'osh' and it will run your existing shell scripts, or type 'oil', and it's a brand new language. ( Tour: https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/oil-language-tou... )

(Note: I also plan to slightly rename the project, to address this confusion, since I've encountered it before. It's confusing that "Oil" is both the whole project and a component of the project.)

-----

2) On the other hand, the Oil language is NOT "just waiting to be deployed". There are a few TODOs in that doc, and they're actually quite big. Though filling them in is going to lead to something pretty great which spans a variety of domains, IMO. I hope to write a few blog posts about that in the coming months.

As always feel free to check out the code and join Zulip. On most Linux distros you can get a working bin/osh in about 30 seconds:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Contributing

The code is in great shape, and completely different than it was 6 months ago. Especially the C++ side. But you can just hack on Python, with MyPy, and it just works!

The tools are also very solid now, with dozens of cleanups/fixes even in the last few weeks. Getting the GC working was a big breath of fresh air that unlocked a lot of possibilities.


hanaryy




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