gflags VS nushell

Someone opened an issue at https://github.com/gflags/gflags/issues/76, to request for a feature of flag alias, and it has been opened for about 7 years.

git clone https://github.com/gflags/gflags.git

Google's command line flags library, known to the public as absl::Flags and formerly gflags, does not distinguish between --foo and -foo, these are both the flag "foo". Each flag has a unique name so there is never a short -f equivalent to --foo, and -foo can never mean -f -o -o.

The main design motivation of absl::Flags is that the flag definitions can appear in any module, not just main. Go inherits this. A quirk that Go did not inherit is gflags --nofoo alternate form of --foo=false.

This is all documented at https://gflags.github.io/gflags/#commandline, which is pretty much a literal export of the flags package documentation that a Google engineer would see internally.

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-...