plugin-foreign-env VS nushell

I am not using Guix's Fish because right I just installed it and was hoping to kinda get my packages up to snuff for what I keep on my desktop. Though I was about to install foreign-env via omf and that seems to work! I am super new to Guix so I still gotta read up on Guix Home. I literally have only installed like 6 packages right now haha.

The official installer leverages an initialization script, to be sourced at shell init time, which is written in POSIX shell. Fish can't just source it because it's not compatible with POSIX shell.

> I then searched the Internet and found a very "creative" workaround for Arch users that didn't work either.

Arch users shouldn't need anything special here.

You can use fenv¹ to source it, you can translate it to bash using babelfish, or you can exec into fish after running bash to log in (make sure to set $SHELL after if you choose that option). Just make sure you do it as early as possible if you want to use things installed by Nix in your other Fish config snippets.

I think Home Manager will also take care of this for you. (The other module systems, Nix-Darwin and NixOS, both do.)

If you wanna do it like NixOS does, you can install Fish via Nix and then create your own preinit environment script in /etc/fish. This has the advantage of setting up your Nix environment variables before any other config is sourced. You can take a look at it here, which also explains some of the Fish initialization process: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

and here's where the hooks go in the Fish package, where the comments describe the Fish initialization process in detail as well as why things are done this way on NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

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1: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/plugin-foreign-env

2: https://github.com/bouk/babelfish

That's just not true, most stuff already has a fish equivalent, and for the minority which doesn't there are plugins like foreign-env

I'm also interested in the correct way of doing this. Right now, I cheat by using the fenv plugin to source a bash ~/.profile file:

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-...