I’ve been trying nushell and words fail me. It’s like it was made for actual humans to use! 🤯 🤯 🤯

It even repeats the column headers at the end of the table if the output takes more than your screen…

Trying to think of how to do the same thing with awk/grep/sort/whatever is giving me a headache. Actually just thinking about awk is giving me a headache. I think I might be allergic.

I’m really curious, what’s your favorite shell? Have you tried other shells than your distro’s default one? Are you an awk wizard or do you run away very fast whenever it’s mentioned?

  • priapus@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    I love Nushell, it’s so much more pleasant for writing scripts IMO. I know some people say they’d just use Python if they need more than what a POSIX shell offers, but I think Nushell is a perfect option in between.

    With a Nushell scripts you get types, structured data, and useful commands for working with them, while still being able to easily execute and pipe external commands. I’ve only ever had two very minor gripes with Nushell, the inability to detach a process, and the lack of a -l flag for cp. Now that uutils supports the -l flag, Nushell support is a WIP, and I realized systemd-run is a better option than just detaching processes when SSHd into a server.

    I know another criticism is that it doesn’t work well with external cli tools, but I’ve honestly never had an issue with any. A ton of CLI tools support JSON output, which can be piped into from json to make working with it in Nushell very easy. Simpler tools often just output a basic table, which can be piped into detect columns to automatically turn it into a Nushell table. Sometimes strange formatting will make this a little weird, but fixing that formatting with some string manipulation (which Nushell also makes very easy) is usually still easier than trying to parse it in Bash.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 months ago

    Nushell looks cool but I prefer to stick with the POSIXes so that I know my scripts will always work and syntax always does what I expect it to. I use zsh as a daily driver, and put up with various bashes, ashes, dashes, that come pre-installed with systems I won’t be using loads (e.g. temporary vms).

    • phantomwise@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      9 months ago

      I don’t really mind having a non-POSIX shell since it doesn’t prevent bash scripts from working, but I get that if you want portability bash is still best since it’ll work mostly anywhere.

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
        0·
        9 months ago

        If I can shebang nutshell (assuming all the builtins from bash or even sh work) and pass a flag to remove all the fancy UI-for-humans formatting so that piped commands int eh scripts work, then I think this is incredible.

        Yeah having this installed along side other more “standard” shells is fine I guess, but it looks like maybe it has some neat functionality that is more difficult in other shells? I guess I’d need to read up on it more but having a non-interactive mode for machines to read more easily would be a huge plus for it overall. I suppose that depends on what it offers/what it’s trying to accomplish.