I'm rebuilding my computer and going through around 15 years of linux improvements in the course of a couple weeks, and this week I'm hunting for bash replacements (bash won't let me automatically run a command before and after each interactive command I execute, which I want for task completion notifications).

There are a lot of new shells, but despite the overwhelming positivity of each thread here they've each been super incomplete/half baked. FWIW I'm looking for a non-posix de-crufted (no oil shell, no zsh) and lightweight/minimal (no fish) shell.

I haven't tried all of these out significantly (really diving in takes hours if not days) but considering my use cases and thoroughly reading the documentation/field reports:

Elvish seemed really cool but has no async/background task support. Furthermore AFAICT you can't iterate over the output of a process _while_ it's running. There are bugs (can't import edit module), there's TODO all over the docs despite supposedly being mature and stable, etc.

Nushell also has no async/background task support (pueue doesn't count, running in separate process trees has countless implications).

Ion shell sounds great on paper, but it's missing the entire first 2-3 chapters of its documentation. It doesn't seem to have any significant background job control, and seems more like a paper-overing of shellisms than a reinvention.

So xonsh seems like the best remaining competitor. It supports background processes with `Popen`, but I can't find an example for async iterating lines. I see lots of examples that are like, `for x in !(ls)` or `for x in $(whatever).splitlines()` but both of those require the command to finish before executing the loop.

Then I keep seeing reports of Ctrl+C breaking with loops, all the python module and environment dependency management madness (plus cross contamination), excessive slowness when mixing python and commands, etc etc.

I'd like to hear a critical rebuttal of these but I think these new shells are more intellectual curiosity than an actual step up. I'm probably going to give up and go with zsh, which while not an improvement at least it will do what I need I don't have to learn anything new.

One thing I've learned though is that although amazing testimony, being someone's main driver isn't a good enough review. Heck, bash has been my main driver for 15 years and it's _awful_. You learn the pain points and then subconsciously avoid doing anything with it near those points.