Person interested in programming, languages, culture, and human flourishing.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I switched from Zsh to Nushell almost two years ago and I have never looked back. If you need POSIX compliance, Nushell is a no go. But it sounds like your real problem was just that Zsh was familiar whereas fish was not. Nushell strikes the perfect balance of offering the commands you’re used to but letting everything just make intuitive sense. Plus, its help command is so far above and beyond other shells. I rarely need to open the Nushell docs (even though they’re really good), and I never have to go the community (even though it’s awesome), because I can figure pretty much everything out just from interacting help within the terminal.


  • I’ve been daily driving for right around a year now. There have been less breaks and difficulties than I expected from pre-1.0 software and it has made my shell experience so delightful!

    I find that when I want to do something simple quickly, nushell enables me to do it with no context switching, little to no friction, and no googling. I can just open/http get my data, pipe it through a really straight forward pipeline that practically writes itself with how clear the commands are, and save it in whatever format is convenient to me. I don’t have to monkey around with Python and packages and virtual environments, and I don’t have to spend 75% of my time googling and debugging insane bashisms. Nushell just works, and the help is so convenient I almost never have to go to the docs.

    My absolute favorite feature is that it’s truly cross-platform. I don’t have to install a compatibility layer like minGW on Windows, I can just make it my default shell and it works great. Then I can use it the exact same way in WSL, macOS, and Linux.

    The reasons to not be interested in nushell imo are:

    1. You’re already comfortable to the point of mastery with bash/zsh/fish, so the ease of use and quality of life improvements from nushell won’t be as valuable to you compared to the cost of switching.
    2. You spend more time in the shell on random servers you don’t want to customize than you do in your own shell. Obviously we are (infinitely?) far away from nushell becoming a default on any platform, so if you aren’t gonna be able to install in the places you would want it most, you’ll just end up infuriated that nothing else is as good as it.