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

• yencabulator 4y ago
  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-1079982875 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 https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/4320 lists a huge number of duplicates.
• SomeoneOnTheWeb 4y ago
  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.
  • raydiatian 4y ago
    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.
  • cleanchit 4y ago
    How does it compare to oh my zsh?
    • steelbrain 4y ago
      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.
    • fwlr 4y ago
      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)
    • nxpnsv 4y ago
      I used ohmyzsh but it somehow got slow, so i switched to zpretzo. It didn't get slow. So that's my comparison :)
  • d3nj4l 4y ago
    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.
• VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  I use eshell for most things, but I do have to occasionally pop open an ansi-term.
• bilekas 4y ago
  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.
  • vargasz 4y ago
    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.
    • bilekas 4y ago
      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.
• sakesun 4y ago
  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.
  • japanman425 4y ago
    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.
  • antihero 4y ago
    What makes it good?
    • sakesun 4y ago
      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.
    • lukeschlather 4y ago
      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`.
• voxadam 4y ago
  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.
  • VulgarExigency 4y ago
    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
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      PowerShell has strange command names? Compared to what? grep, sed, awk, and a bunch of two letter abbreviations from the before-times?
      • VulgarExigency 4y ago
        Compared to what the majority of people who frequently use the terminal are used to.
        • vips7L 4y ago
          It’s different so it’s bad. /s
  • sakesun 4y ago
    I use Powershell as standard shell on WSL (Linux on Windows) Everything is the same as Windows
  • PeterWhittaker 4y ago
    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.
• readingnews 4y ago
  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...)
  • oblio 4y ago
    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.
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  i know a fair few eshell users. i’m not among them but they’re out there
• pthr 4y ago
  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.
  • deafpolygon 4y ago
    > 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?
    • pthr 4y ago
      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!
      • deafpolygon 4y ago
        Every command has a short name. A handy "punctuations" cheatsheet I found on reddit: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PSPunctuationWallChart_1_0_4.pdf 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-powershell-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.
• atemerev 4y ago
  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.
  • ilaksh 4y ago
    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.
  • worksonmine 4y ago
    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.
• pringk02 4y ago
  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
  • mejutoco 4y ago
    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.
    • qup 4y ago
      ctrl+R and...you keep pushing it to go back in time. In case anyone needs to know.
    • robochat 4y ago
      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
      • guitarbill 4y ago
        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.
• tn1 4y ago
  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
• anonyfox 4y ago
  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.
  • pinkbeanz 4y ago
    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.
    • hulitu 4y ago
      They could have fix the security bugs.
  • JonChesterfield 4y ago
    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).
    • richardwhiuk 4y ago
      subprocess.check_call() is more verbose than bash, but probably a better option.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• 331c8c71 4y ago
  I've been using fish for a couple years on my work laptops
• jnsaff2 4y ago
  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/ https://starship.rs/ [1] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
  • msm_ 4y ago
    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.
    • jnsaff2 4y ago
      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 https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide [1] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
  • petepete 4y ago
    I use one fish plugin and it's a total gamechanger https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish 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.
    • mk12 4y ago
      Shameless plug for my plugin https://github.com/mk12/fish-fzf 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.
• notorandit 4y ago
  Bash. Forever.
• d12bb 4y ago
  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…
  • zanchey 4y ago
    Mostly it's because you can't copy and paste stuff from blogs or Stack Overflow.
    • zkldi 4y ago
      but you can just run `bash`, paste the command, and then `exit`?
• acdha 4y ago
  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.
• karesztrk 4y ago
  Im on Nu shell on Windows os. Im very satisfied with it
• OJFord 4y ago
  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.
• hanaryy 4y ago
  hanaryy
• maxloh 4y ago
  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.
  • darrenf 4y ago
    > 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 {} +
    • akkartik 4y ago
      Do you really have rename on your computer? What OS is this?
      • nosklo 4y ago
        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-linux/fedora-rawhide.html#files https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/util-linux/util-linu...
  • arp242 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• traverseda 4y ago
  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/ https://xon.sh/
• steinuil 4y ago
  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.
• Myrmornis 4y ago
  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.
• txomon 4y ago
  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/ https://elv.sh/
• trollied 4y ago
  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.
• NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  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/WhyISwitchedToRc 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.
  • euclaise 4y ago
    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.
  • jsrcout 4y ago
    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.
• euclaise 4y ago
  I use yash personally (https://yash.osdn.jp/ 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.
• zioroboco 4y ago
  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.
  • oblio 4y ago
    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?
    • ripley12 4y ago
      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)
• kuon 4y ago
  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.
• anthk 4y ago
  mpsh it's interesting. https://www.cca.org/mpsh/ https://www.cca.org/mpsh/
• Kinrany 4y ago
  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.
• DiabloD3 4y ago
  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?
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    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.
    • kstrauser 4y ago
      They’re not doing a full rewrite from scratch, but an incremental replacement.
  • ripley12 4y ago
    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.
• adityaathalye 4y ago
  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/ https://www.evalapply.org/tags/bash/ edit: add reference
• genshii 4y ago
  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.
• sureste 4y ago
  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 https://github.com/jorgebucaran/fisher [2]: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/interactive.html#abbreviations https://fishshell.com/docs/current/interactive.html#abbrevia...
  • cassepipe 4y ago
    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.)
• deleted 4y ago
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• jceb81 4y ago
  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.
• nurspouse 4y ago
  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.
• yewenjie 4y ago
  I wish murex got some more love - https://murex.rocks/ https://murex.rocks/
• nathias 4y ago
  I'm using zsh, but that hardly counts as alternative
• aidenn0 4y ago
  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.
• dncornholio 4y ago
  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.
• ledauphin 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
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• v3ss0n 4y ago
  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
• LinuxBender 4y ago
  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/bashisms_yes_or_no/ https://teddit.sethforprivacy.com/r/linux/comments/1h13g8/ba...
• bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  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.
• rcpt 4y ago
  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.
  • graphe 4y ago
    It's easy, you can just add bash to the beginning of the code and you can run the same script there.
    • rcpt 4y ago
      Ya but stuff like fzf and .bashrc it's just easier to use what everyone else has
• happimess 4y ago
  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.
• tonnydourado 4y ago
  Does PowerShell counts as alternative? Is wildly different from any POSIX shell, but I use it daily and it's kinda alright.
• chubot 4y ago
  (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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34221617 https://www.oilshell.org/blog/ 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-tour.html 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 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.