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Comment by dietr1ch | Hacker News Reader

I moved from bash => zsh => fish. I wanted reasonable features on my shell, and fish was much faster and needed almost no plugins.

The fact that I can write a simple for loop without needing to look up how to do it by far beats the POSIX compatibility, if I need it I can still write a bash script, but when using the shell I don't need to recall where semicolons or `do`, brackets (and how many) go.

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Is it that hard to remember a bash for loop?

  for i in $(seq 1 10)
  do echo $i
  done

Then you can just replace new lines with ; if writing a one liner.

  for i in $(seq 1 10); do echo $i; done

I guess it isn't as simple as python

  for i in range(10): print(i)

but it's pretty close aside from the variable binding.

Bash has some subtleties around loops that can be frustrating, like the body of your loop _may_ actually be running in a subshell (common when iterating over a file), making it difficult to extract what you want from it.

i bet it's the `cat file | while read …` loop what you are referring to, not any loop. but correct me.

In zsh you can avoid the do if you have a single instruction:

    for i in {1..10}; echo $i

to me is as clear as the python version. Very compact and useful for one liners.

As someone dealing with new remote machines on a daily basis, I cannot fantasize about any other shell. Bash is pretty straightforward.

  for i in {1..10}

And look at all of those finger bending symbols!

> I moved from bash => zsh => fish

Did the same, but moved on.

Now it is: bash => zsh => fish => nu

What did you prefer about nu?

Working with tables of data feels more right, more like programming then the usual shell. I also work quite often with CSV and it's nice to be able to manipulate/filter it like any other data that nu is able to read (just: open file.csv | find "foobar" | select name message).

Not quite a straightforward as nu seams to be, but I used to have ipython as my shell when I did a lot of work with CSV. It’s “not a shell” but includes some shell like functions to make listing dirs and such easier.

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