The Case for Nushell (2023)

Summary

Recently, I had a chat with some of my friends about Nushell and why they stuck with traditional shells like bash/zsh or the "new" hotness like fish rather than using Nushell. After chatting with them, my brain kept bubbling away at the state of how folks were using their terminals and the end result is this blog post. In this post, I make the case for really taking a hard look at Nushell and also for generally asking the question: "can the state of shells be improved enough to overcome the inertia of sticking to what you know?" The lay of the land Let's take a look at some of the offerings out there that people are using everyday. Bash/zsh Bash, originally a set of improvements on the Bourne shell, has grown to be the default shell for almost all Linux distros. That's generally people's first experience when they hit the terminal. It's what they see when they log into a remote machine. It's reached the definition of ubiquitous. I also throw 'zsh' in here as well. Apple's macOS switched from bash to zsh, an operationally similar shell but created a bit more recently. Bash at this point has become so well known that people often confuse support for bash-isms as part of the POSIX standard, but we'll talk about that later. Pros: it's everywhere. Learn once, run anywhere. Cons: as a language, bash/zsh feels a bit too retro. It doesn't offer any of the modern programming language style, tool support, etc folks would be used to from other languages. In truth, bash was never really meant for writing the kind of large scripts that people are maintaining today. Example for loop in bash: #!/bin/bash for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo $i done Fish As fish's website says: "Finally, a command line shell for the 90s" It's enough to elicit a smirk, because you know it's a bit true. The bash/zsh style shells are getting left behind by something that feels a bit nicer, has nicer completions, looks nicer (you can get similar improvements out of bash if you work at it, but fish ships with t...