clamshell VS xonsh

This is well made case - but I'm not sure I buy the central argument. Within some basic limits, I don't think terseness and readability have the contradiction made out here, because in programming we have abstraction, which gives us both.

To take the example command that's given:

beef.txt | grep "lasagna" | sort -n | uniq

Sure, writing the logic out for this in something like python straight out the bat with only the standard library might look messy, but with one basic convenience function it could quickly be:

search(for='lasagna', in='beef.txt', clear_duplicates=False).sorted()

Obviously you have to write the function in the first place, but I'd say if you're doing something like this often, it's easily worth spending that 2 minutes. And if you're not doing this often, you'll have a faster time writing more code, but keeping less heavy lifting of "how does bash pipe together" in your head.

I shared a project here a few weeks ago experimenting with what my dream shell might look like, what surprised me more than anything else, was how easy writing a repl environment actually is. I put a scrappy one together as one person in a few hours, so I don't understand why as developers we've reached general language models before being able to make a powerful, but new-user friendly shell.

Also, completely unrelated note, but posix only allows passing back strings - but isn't this true of web apis too which we use all the time? How come no json as a standard passback from programs?

Shameless plug for the project I mentioned earlier: https://github.com/benrutter/clamshell

clamshell – experimenting with a python based shell

Check it out here!

xonsh – Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell

You need to downgrade ptk version. Look here - https://github.com/xonsh/xonsh/issues/5241#issuecomment-1961...

Friends, I'm not saying that tools like zx are not good. I do like to write some scripts using js/ts. I believe pythoners prefer https://xon.sh/ . Perl is also attractive and interesting. Fish is friendly.

However, I still believe that posix-shell has its own advantages. The balance among size, code length, and expressiveness. I think the only possible competitors are tcl and perl, maybe lua.

Those of you who use (or used) this as your shell: care to share your experience?

It seems a lot less full-featured than https://xon.sh/, but maybe you don't need a lot of bells and whistles for regular usage. I mostly run build, execute, and install commands.

I'm somewhat enticed at the possibility of being able to wrap common executables into forms that are typed (like nushell or elvish) and manipulate them in a way that leverages the type checker.

In that case, is it even more similar to xonsh?

https://xon.sh/