PowerShell VS nushell

PowerShell is so alien to an experienced bash/zsh/etc. user that it's an entirely different language not any kind of drop-in replacement. Its designers also refuse to add simple things to make the switch any easier (e.g. https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/3316).

Not necessarily:

1. UNIX-compatibility aliases like "ls -> Get-ChildItem" and "cat -> Get-Content" are not defined in PowerShell on Linux or macOS. For a complete list of these, see the PowerShell source code[1] (look for "#if !UNIX").

2. A number of aliases from PowerShell ≤ 5.1 were removed in PowerShell Core (≥ 6.0), including the particularly annoying "curl -> Invoke-WebRequest" (conflicts with curl.exe) and "sc -> Set-Content" (conflicts with sc.exe).

[1] https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/8ea1598964590b...

and do a no-install copy-paste deployment of powershell 7 and modules. (I'm not saying you should do this instead of using Lua, just that you can).

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

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.

In contrast to Rust, NuShell has try/catch control structures to capture and deal with errors, however, like more imperatively leaning languages (for example, Java or Python). There is no result type in the standard library at the time of writing.

While the tricks are nice, we also have the option of jumping to something like http://www.nushell.sh/ for an overall more sane environment.

Nushell

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