cw VS nushell

For things that are commonly and almost-ideally represented as text files, there’s a lot of Rust based alternatives are faster and have more features than the old unix/GNU tools: ripgrep, fd, cw, and you can find more in this list.

Nice, beats my old Rust wc through sheer brute force on my old 12c/24t server:

A lot of unix-y tools have been rewritten in rust, where the usefulness comes from it being faster or having more features. Examples: bat, cw, lsd, ripgrep, diskonaut, gping. Maybe you could find an interesting program to rewrite?

cw, an optionally-multithreaded bytecount-accelerated wc clone

Having written a Rust wc implementation a few years ago (https://github.com/Freaky/cw), I had a look at theirs.

It's pretty naive - a simple linewise read_until loop, a conditional to avoid word splitting and such if it's not needed, and for some reason it collects results into an array and prints when it's done rather than printing as it goes.

It doesn't support --files0-from like GNU wc, so isn't a drop-in replacement from that perspective. It also has the sadly common Rust trope of only supporting filenames that are valid UTF-8.

It doesn't seem overly slow considering its simplicity - usually trading blows with GNU and BSD wc. Perhaps the most glaring omission is the lack of a fast path for -c, which should reduce to a stat() call. Also unfortunate not to use the excellent bytecount crate to provide a very fast -l/m path.

The read_until loop also makes its memory use unpredictable compared with other wc's. If you run it on /dev/zero it will try to eat your computer.

The first method is through downloading the pre-built binaries. With this method, you don't need to install anything other than Nushell's dependencies. Once you've downloaded the binaries, add them to your system's environment path to run it directly in your terminal.

I rather nushell for this purpose, it's more fun to write and easier to read.

https://www.nushell.sh/

These are just three small examples of what this shell written in Rust allows. The features are many and many more, but I'll leave it up to you to discover and enjoy them; I'm currently playing around with it and it's giving me a lot of satisfaction and immediacy, now it has a fixed place among the tools I use when working! The project is Open Source, so if you want to contribute, I invite you, as always, to do so, I leave you the link to the repo here!

Any thoughts on fish as compared to nushell [0]? It's similar to PowerShell in its philosophy and is also written in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/nushell/nushell

> In PowerShell, structured output is the default and it seems to work very well.

PowerShell goes a step beyond JSON, by supporting actual mutable objects. So instead of just passing through structured data, you effectively pass around opaque objects that allow you to go back to earlier pipeline stages, and invoke methods, if I understand correctly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof....

I'm rather fond of wrappers like jc and libxo, and experimental shells like https://www.nushell.sh/. These still focus on passing data, not objects with executable methods. On some level, I find this comfortable: Structured data still feels pretty Unix-like, if that makes sense? If I want actual objects, then it's probably time to fire up Python or Ruby.

Knowing when to switch from a shell script to a full-fledged programming language is important, even if your shell is basically awesome and has good programming features.

Maybe if the "popular" shells, but http://www.nushell.sh/ is looking better and better

Yeah agreed, especially now that PowerShell is available cross-platform.

Nushell[1] also seems like a promising alternative, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

[1]: https://www.nushell.sh/

I also discovered an existing discussion[1] related to this topic which includes a link[2] to a "helper to call nushell nuon/json/yaml commands from bash/fish/zsh" and a comment[3] that the current nushell dev focus is "on getting the experience inside nushell right and [we] probably won't be able to dedicate design time to get the interface of native Nu commands with an outside POSIX shell right and stable.".

[0] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[1] "Expose some commands to external world #6554": https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554

[2] https://github.com/cruel-intentions/devshell-files/blob/mast...

[3] https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/6554#issuecomment-...