I agree with some of your frustrations, but it's honestly not that bad once you setup your environment properly and get used to some of the quirks. > I feel li

I agree with some of your frustrations, but it's honestly not that bad once you setup your environment properly and get used to some of the quirks. > I feel like I spend 45 minutes every time I write a shell script to determine simple things like "is this environment variable set". Adopt some best practices[1] and have a template to start new scripts with. ShellCheck also helps with avoiding the most common pitfalls. > I find myself reaching for purpose-built tools rather than ad-hoc pipelines It helps to distinguish day-to-day interactive work in the shell from writing portable shell scripts that will be robust and require little maintenance for years to come. For the former you want user friendly tools that help you the most with a particular task. For the latter you want to use battle-tested tools with a stable interface that are available on many systems or are preferably built-in to the shell. > I am getting more and more frustrated at basic shell mechanics like history handling That's mostly a solved problem in many shells. Zsh supports it natively[2]. I wouldn't want to discourage you from writing your own shell, good luck with that, but there are plenty of good POSIX compatible and alternative shells out there. We can agree that "real" programming languages are much more powerful, safer and friendlier, but plain old shell scripts are the right tool for the job in many situations and shouldn't be ignored at all cost. [1]: http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/ http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/ [2]: https://nuclearsquid.com/writings/shared-history-in-zsh/ https://nuclearsquid.com/writings/shared-history-in-zsh/