nushell VS jq

Compare nushell vs jq and see what are their differences.

Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
nushell jq
212 52
29,864 28,972
2.5% 1.7%
9.9 9.4
4 days ago 7 days ago
Rust C
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

nushell

Posts with mentions or reviews of nushell. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-14.
  • NuShell - Ceci n'est pas une |
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Mar 2024
    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!
  • Xonsh: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2024
  • Fish shell 3.7.0: last release branch before the full Rust rewrite
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2024
    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

  • jc: Converts the output of popular command-line tools to JSON
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    > 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.

  • Ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, Git grep, ucg, pt, sift}
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023
    Maybe if the "popular" shells, but http://www.nushell.sh/ is looking better and better
  • "<ESC>[31M"? ANSI Terminal security in 2023 and finding 10 CVEs
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Oct 2023
  • jq 1.7 Released
    33 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Sep 2023
    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/

  • The Case for Nushell
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Aug 2023
    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-...

    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Aug 2023
    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

  • Simple PowerShell things allowing you to dig a bit deeper than usual
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Aug 2023
    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

jq

Posts with mentions or reviews of jq. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-21.
  • Frawk: An efficient Awk-like programming language. (2021)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Apr 2024
  • Dehydrated: Letsencrypt/acme client implemented as a shell-script
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
  • I turned my open-source project into a full-time business
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    I think like you. But also, one does not necessarily know beforehand that they will want to make money.

    Like a project could be born out of pure generosity, but after the happy initial phase the project might get too heavy on the maintenance requirements, causing the author to approach burnout, and possibly deciding that they want to make money to continue pulling the cart forward.

    However, here's something I do think: if you create something as Open Source, it should be out of a mentality of goodwill and for the greater good, regardless of how it ends up being used. OSS licenses do mean this with their terms. If you later get tired or burned out, you should just retire and allow the community to keep taking care of it. Just like it happened with the Jq tool [1].

    [1]: https://github.com/jqlang/jq/releases/tag/jq-1.7

  • How to load JSON data in PostgreSQL with the the COPY command
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Feb 2024
    In this blog we'll see how to upload the JSON directly using PostgreSQL COPY command and using an utility called jq!
  • How to Recover Locally Deleted Files From Github
    1 project | dev.to | 31 Jan 2024
    And we can then make it easier to find the commit by filtering the response with jq.
  • Essential Command Line Tools for Developers
    29 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2024
    Official Documentation: jqlang.github.io/jq
  • Command line tools I always install on Ubuntu servers
    4 projects | dev.to | 25 Dec 2023
    To handle JSON files and JSON outputs in a script or format and highlight it, jq can be very handy. Many command line tools provide a json output, so you don't have to write a custom parser for a table a list in a terminal. Instead of that, you can use jq to get a specific value from the output or even modify the output. For more information, you can visit https://jqlang.github.io/jq/
  • How I use Nix in my Elm projects
    8 projects | dev.to | 19 Dec 2023
    In some projects I've wanted to use HTTPie to test APIs and jq to work with some JSON data. Nix has been really helpful in managing those dependencies that I can't easily get from npm.
  • Gooey: Turn almost any Python command line program into a full GUI application
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Dec 2023
    > I'd love to see programs communicate through a typed JSON/proto format that shed enough details to make this more independent, and get useful shell command structuring/completion or full blown GUIs from simply introspecting the expected input and output types.

    You should try PowerShell. It's basically Microsoft's .NET ecosystem molded into an interactive command line. I'm not entirely sure if PoweShell can make full use of the static types that build up its core, but its ability to exchange objects in the command line is almost unmatched.

    On Linux you can use `jc` (https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc) combined with `jq` (https://jqlang.github.io/jq/) to glue together command lines.

  • To a Man with `Jq`, Everything Looks Like JSON
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    Yeah, but muscle memory bites me all the time and I put the backslash on the closing paren, too, because I'm so used to the regex usage of that syntax which needs them to match

    I also want to draw the reader's attention to the magic of |@uri <https://github.com/jqlang/jq/blob/jq-1.7/docs/content/manual...> for a bunch of cases, but doubly so in TFA's case where they're plugging strings into a URI context. Simple string concat often works great for "hello world", but the world is not always just hello, so one quick use of the filter and jq's got your back

      echo "the world's scary" | jq -Rr '"\(.)"'

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nushell and jq you can also consider the following projects:

fish-shell - The user-friendly command line shell.

yq - Command-line YAML, XML, TOML processor - jq wrapper for YAML/XML/TOML documents

elvish - Powerful scripting language & Versatile interactive shell

jp - Validate and transform JSON with Bash

starship - ☄🌌️ The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

gojq - Pure Go implementation of jq

PowerShell - PowerShell for every system!

Jolt - JSON to JSON transformation library written in Java.

alacritty - A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.

dasel - Select, put and delete data from JSON, TOML, YAML, XML and CSV files with a single tool. Supports conversion between formats and can be used as a Go package.

xonsh - :shell: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell.

jmespath.py - JMESPath is a query language for JSON.