I’m really curious, what’s your favorite shell?

Emacs eshell+eat

It essentially reverses the terminal/shell relationship. Here, it’s the shell that starts a terminal session for every command. Eshell is also tightly integrated with Emacs and has access to all the extended functionality. You can use Lisp in one-liners, you can pipe output directly to an emacs buffer, you can write custom commands as lisp functions, full shortcut customization not limited to terminal keys, history search via the completion framework (i.e. consult-history), easy prompt customization, etc.

There’s also Tramp, which lets you transparently cd into remote hosts via ssh, docker containers, SMB/NFS-shares, archive files, and work with them as if they were normal directories (obviously with limited functionality in some cases, like archives).

And probably a lot of stuff I’m missing right now.

I like nushell, but I love xonsh. Xonsh is the bastard love child of Python and Bash.

it can be thought of as:

• try this statement in Python
• if there’s an exception, try it in bash.

Now, that’s not a very accurate description, because the reality is more nuanced, but it allows for things like:

for file in !(find | grep -i '[.]mp3^'):
    file = Path(file.strip())
    if file != Path('.') and file != file.with_suffix('.mp3'):
    mv @(file) @(file.with_suffix('.mp3'))

Now, there are things in there I wouldn’t bother with normally - like, rather than using mv, I’d just use file.rename(), but the snippet shows a couple of the tools for interaction between xonsh and sh.

• !(foo) - if writing python, execute foo, and return lines
• @(foo) - if writing sh, substitute with the value of the foo variable.

But, either a line is treated in a pyhony way, or in a shelly way - and if a line is shelly, you can reference Python variables or expressions via @(), and if it’s Pythony, you can execute shell code with !() or $(), returning the lines or the exact value, respectively.

Granted, I love python and like shell well enough, and chimeras are my jam, so go figure.

I’ve had nushell as my daily driver for a couple years now and I love it. “Made for actual humans to use” is exactly the description I’d give.

Nushell looks cool but I prefer to stick with the POSIXes so that I know my scripts will always work and syntax always does what I expect it to. I use zsh as a daily driver, and put up with various bashes, ashes, dashes, that come pre-installed with systems I won’t be using loads (e.g. temporary vms).

I’ve been using fish (with starship for prompt) for like a year I think, after having had a self-built zsh setup for … I don’t know how long.

I’m capable of using awk but in a very simple way; I generally prefer being able to use jq. IMO both awk and perl are sort of remnants of the age before JSON became the standard text-based structured data format. We used to have to write a lot of dinky little regex-based parsers in Perl to extract data. These days we likely get JSON and can operate on actual data structures.

I tried nu very briefly but I’m just too used to POSIX-ish shells to bother switching to another model. For scripting I’ll use #!/bin/bash with set -eou pipefail but very quickly switch to Python if it looks like it’s going to have any sort of serious logic.

My impression is that there’s likely more of us that’d like a less wibbly-wobbly, better shell language for scripting purposes, but that efforts into designing such a language very quickly goes in the direction of nu and oil and whatnot.

Looks like it’s taken a page from PowerShell in passing structured data rather than just text.

I prefer getting comfortable with bash, because it’s everywhere and I need it for work anyway (no fancy shells in remote VMs). But you can customize bash a lot to give more colored feedback or even customize the shortcuts with readline. Another one is pwsh (powershell) because it’s by default in Windows machines that (sadly) I sometimes have to use as VMs too. But you can also install it in linux since it’s now open source.

But if I wanted to experiment personally I’d go for xonsh, it’s a python-based one. So you have all the tools and power of python with terminal convenience.

'cause it was quarter part eleven on a Saturday in 1999

🎶🎶

To answer your questions, I work on the Bash, because it’s what’s largely used at work and I don’t have the nerve to constantly make the switch in my head. I have tried nushell for a few minutes a few months ago, and I think it might actually be great as a human interface, but maybe not so much for scripting, idk.

I use zsh, mainly because I’ve been using it for a really long time and it felt like an upgraded bash.

I also have used fish a tiny amount and like the idea but zsh just works for my purposes and I already know how it works.

nushell looks really cool though!

I don’t have much occasion to use awk any more but it can be really useful!

Love nushell. It’s just about the most practical functional programming language I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.

I’m using fish as my default shell since it’s more standards-compliant and plays nicer with tools that modify your environment. But any time I need to do more complicated shell scripting, I’m breaking out nushell.

Why not parse ls (and what to do instead)?

Nushell is great, I should use it again. Gave up on it after I wrote a thing for converting fish completions to their autocomplete system for it and their internal autocomplete didn’t perform anywhere nearly adequately.