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Comment by thibran | Hacker News Reader

Its almost ironical that we still use the Terminal - and many use it like in the eighties using Bash - and seem to have forgotten that we should invent a better terminal & shell than doing all the workarounds to handle the quirks of the current systems.

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We did! Nushell and Powershell are both so much better than bash that it's not even funny. There's zero reason to use a bash derivative in this day and age, they only persist through inertia + a minority of masochists actually like bash.

You can install whatever shell you want on your system, and there are tons of better alternatives out there. Where it's actually sticky is in the lowest-common-denominator cases, when you need to throw together a quick series of commands that need to be run on a semi-arbitrary system. In that case there are VERY few options because you have to use whatever is already on the system. Sometimes you're lucky enough you can safely assume bash is present, but in many cases you have to assume only sh. Unfortunately both are a difficult/footgun enough language that it greatly helps to start out using it daily to get familiar, and that's where most people end up peaking. Additionally you may need to manually jump into that semi-arbitrary system and do things manually. You're limited by the minimal tools already there, so you better be familiar enough with them already. This is the very reason I've learned some basic Vi commands as well, even though I would never even consider using it otherwise.

In my experience Power shell is actually a terrible replacement because you have to learn not only every command, but the structured return and available input formats of every command in order to do anything. The design of almost all shells is specifically to avoid that and reduce to a common universal input/output format. Powershell could certainly be useful as an intermediate choice between a full blown language and shell scripting though, if you needed more power but not so much to make it worth the load of a real language, but would also require it to be ubiquitous already (which it's not).

Make a better system, and we'll consider using it.

A Terminal + Bash/ZSH is soooo sticky because they are VERY good at what they do once you learn the basics and quirks. And now with LLMs, CLIs are even better because LLMs talk in text and CLIs talk in text.

Microsoft tried with PowerShell to design a better system; it "technically" is better, but not "better enough" to justify the cost of switching (on Linux). The same is true of nushell; it is "better", but not better enough to justify switching for most people.

I believe we're at "peak input method" until someone invents Brain<->Computer interfaces.

I use the Terminal all the time and write my own CLI tools, but I'm feeling more and more the limits of the current system. With the years I have used almost all available shells (EShell was even my default for some time). Right now my favorite shell is Nushell, but still, it feels dated compare to what is possible on modern computers.

> Make a better system, and we'll consider using it. It's on my TODO list, but it will break with all conventions and tools (no TTY). My idea is to bring the chain-things-together idea to the 21st century using a keyboard first GUI.

Powershell and nushell are both miles better than bash and its descendants. I switched to nushell and you couldn't pay me to go back to bash. I only wish that it was kosher to install it on servers at work, but alas it isn't so I have to suffer with bash when managing systems.

What alternative would you suggest?

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