aush VS fzf

I'll put it this way: Nu shell seems perfectly supportive of my philosophy that a shell is basically a REPL for a computer, and they're taking the ergonomics of an interactive REPL along with the programming language that powers that REPL seriously.

The thing is, there's currently NOTHING GOOD for "shell scripting". Shell sucks (yes it does), so for anything more than very short things I'd rather write Python. But Python sucks for shell-like things, parallelization, it has slow startup, and you also can't do things like put environment variables into your session or change the working directory, so you often wind up writing shims (eg. Broot's br alias - https://dystroy.org/broot/install-br/).

Yes I've looked at Xonsh but maybe the additional syntax is offputting to me. Like, I wouldn't use it as a shell over Zsh (how's Xonsh's fzf support? I don't know, but I know everything's going to support Zsh), and I dunno if I want to use its syntax extensions over just Python. Though It's always on my list of things to re-explore, and maybe it'll click one day. But it being based in Python makes it feel slow (I wrote my prompt in Zig to get it to be fast...)

This is relevant to mention: I wrote a small Python library (https://github.com/kbd/aush) that's basically a DSL for subprocesses, so it tries to make it more convenient to do shell-like things. I find it preferable to shell or Python alone most of the time. Here's an example of its use in my script that creates a new Python project: https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/HOME/bin/create-pyt...

I haven't figured out a convenient way to implement shell piping well with Python's pipe operator, or pass through interactive output directly (so things that "update" the display, like poetry and npm don't behave the same as they do interactively) so it's still .9 status, but it works really well for what it is, and you can always write "regular Python" along with it.

Anyway, Nu seems to be an attempt to put a "real" programming language REPL in my shell, from people who have serious language experience, so I'm hopeful it'll be great.

In addition, I think bash's `operate-and-get-next` can be very helpful. When you go back through your shell history, you can hit Ctrl+o instead of enter and it will execute the command then put the next one in your history on the command line, and keep track of where you are in your history. This way, you can rerun a bunch of commands by going to the first one and Ctrl+o till you are done. And you can edit those commands and hit Ctrl+o and still go to the next previously run command.

Note: fzf's history search feature breaks this. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/issues/2399

fzf : https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Those are the most used aliases in my gitconfig.

"git fza" shows a list of modified/new files in an fzf window, and you can select each file with tab plus arrow keys. When you hit enter, those files are fed into "git add". Needs fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

"git gone" removes local branches that don't exist on the remote.

"git root" prints out the root of the repo. You can alias it to "cd $(git root)", and zip back to the repo root from a deep directory structure. This one is less useful now for me since I started using zoxide to jump around. https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

> my history is so noisy I had to find another way

The fzf search syntax can help, if you become familiar with it. It is also supported in atuin [2].

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#search-syntax

[2]: https://docs.atuin.sh/configuration/config/#fuzzy-search-syn...

You call it with `n` and get an interactive fuzzy search for your directories. If you do `n ` instead, it’ll start the find with `` already filled in (and if there’s only one match, jump to it directly). The `ls` is optional but I find that I like having the contents visible as soon as I change a directory.

I’m also including iCloud Drive but excluding the Library directory as that is too noisy. I have a separate `nl` function which searches just inside `~/Library` for when I need it, as well as other specialised `n` functions that search inside specific places that I need a lot.

¹ https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

² https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

View on GitHub

I do find the history pager stuff interesting, but ultimately not of tremendous use for me. I rebound all my history search stuff to use fzf[1] (via a fish plugin for such[2]), and so haven't been aware of the issues

[1] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

[2] https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish

You can also use fzf with ripgrep to great effect:

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/blob/master/ADVANCED.md#usin...