Nushell: A New Kind of Shell | Hacker News Reader

Nushell: A New Kind of Shell

nushell.sh

28 pointsstevefan19998 comments

I’m using this shell daily, because it also works very well on Windows out of the box, without installing Cygwin or MSYS. (Yes, and I’m not using cmd because it’s frankly shit, and Powershell is just too weird to get accustomed to.)

The other option for Windows users for a sane, usable shell is busybox-w32 (https://frippery.org/busybox). But then you miss out on any of the fancy autocompletion or syntax highlighting, which is what I’m primarily using nu-shell for, I haven’t even tried their structural data stuff yet and it’s already good as a Windows shell!

I used to use nushell for months, but I eventually switched back to zsh. I really liked their pipelines for working with data and I believe that nu is superior to bashisms.

The problem is that I never actually used them. I'm not a big shell user, I use the terminal a lot, but I rarely do any pipelining on the shell (I rarely use find, grep, jq, sed etc). The pain point came that I couldn't just copy-paste quick shell oneliners online for quick installs etc.

The examples look a lot easier to use and remember than your typical UNIX shell.

Has anyone tried this shell on linux? If so, what are the reviews? Do we know when 1.0 will come out?

I also wonder if there is a frecency file jumper, like z.

Looks absolutely amazing!

It seems this "shell" is not designed to execute commands by default? "Native Shell Commands" section[0] actually says:

> Nu allows you to access native shell programs by escaping the program name with ^.

> sc is a Windows CMD program that is used for communicating with the Service Control Manager

I'll argue that if you cannot enter the name of executable on the line directly and have it executed, it is not an actual "shell", but just some sort of interactive-oriented language.

Also author calling sc.exe "an Windows CMD program" makes me suspect that author is not very familiar with low-level shell concepts such as "terminal", "console", "PATH" and so on. A random sample of source code, which always hardcodes "sh" for shell files (! no bash for you, buddy !) seems to support this [1].

[0] https://www.nushell.sh/cookbook/native_shell_programs.html

[1] https://github.com/nushell/nushell/blob/565be6aaefc60be15426...

It sounds like you know more than I do. How would you compare this to PowerShell? Using a special method to call Windows command line programs is something both Nushell and PowerShell have in common.

It does run any command, but nushell has its own versions of a few commands, like "ls". For those commands, you can call the native ones by using ^

Reply on news.ycombinator.com