PowerShell VS nushell

msiexec.exe /package https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.6/PowerShell-7.2.6-win-x64.msi /quiet ADD_EXPLORER_CONTEXT_MENU_OPENPOWERSHELL=1 ADD_FILE_CONTEXT_MENU_RUNPOWERSHELL=1 ENABLE_PSREMOTING=1 REGISTER_MANIFEST=1 USE_MU=1 ENABLE_MU=1 ADD_PATH=1

This smells like when PowerShell aliased curl and wget to a completely different command, with incompatible arguments.

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901

PowerShell is available on macOS and Linux as well (source on Github: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell). It may not be as well-integrated with things like system services management, but the language still works well. You can still use all the command line tools you're used to on Linux, of course.

nushell does look interesting, though the lack of a .deb repository does put it pretty low on my to-do list.

Issue #7940 discusses potential improvements to array slicing.

Note: This can be problematic as it prevents upstream commands from running their end {} block. See here. The new clean {} block introduced in PowerShell v7.3 does not suffer from this issue.

Can you give an example of something that PS can do that is built-in for text processing, instead of a proprietary symbolic query language?

[1] https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/LICENSE... is the MIT license. (Microsoft supplies debs directly which may reduce the motivation for Debian to do so.)

Oh, heh, also https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/docs/bu... the build script is written in PowerShell, so there's a bootstrapping problem :-) (Debian has solved those before of course, but with community sentiment like the above maybe noone is motivated to bother.)

According to https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/19628, the default behaviour is invoked whenever the completion script returns no output. To attempt to do so, I tried exiting the script via returning an empty string, or using the return keyword to exit the script completely, unfortunately with no avail. Is there a technique to achieve what I want, and is there any documentation about it other than the official one? Thank you in advance.

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-...

I appreciate what projects like Nushell and Murex are trying to address, but having a saner scripting language and passing structured data in pipelines is not worth the drawbacks for me.

For one, Bash scripting is not so bad if you set some sane defaults and use ShellCheck. Sure, it has its quirks, but all languages do. Even so, the same golden rule applies: use a "real" programming language if your problem exceeds a certain level of complexity. This is relative and will depend on your discomfort threshold, but using the right tool for the job is always a good practice. No matter how good the shell language is, I would hesitate to write and maintain a complex project in it.

And for general QoL improvements with interactive use, Zsh is a fine shell, while still being POSIX compatible.

[1]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/blob/main/crates/nu-comma...

[2]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5027

[3]: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/9310

I found nushell (https://www.nushell.sh) to be an impressive replacement "bash" for Windows

In terms of philosophy, think "Powershell but actually intuitive" : Every data is structured but command names are what you expect them to be. I usually don't even need to look at the documentation.

I liked it so much that I also replaced my shell on Linux with it, so I have the same terminal experience across all OSes