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[return to "The Case for Nushell (2023)"]
1. BadBad+Wo[view] [source] 2026-01-07 17:48:36
>>raveni+(OP)
I have always struggled a bit with shell replacements. I use zsh but only because of oh-my-zsh. Apart from that I always thought of shell scripts as a necessary evil for interoperability. Today you can usually expect a linux system to have bash or at least sh. That is why I do shell scripting. Nushell is usally not preinstalled on a system and so I cannot expect it.

If I want to do real scripting/programming I use python or another dedicated programming language. I don't really know what the value of Nushell is for me. Maybe the plugin system is amazing but at the moment I miss nothing in my zsh.

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2. mmh000+NG[view] [source] 2026-01-07 18:54:47
>>BadBad+Wo
I really would like a new shell that wasn't based on a poorly designed programming language from the 1960s[1][2]

However, I need to know sh/bash well because they're the tools installed by default; in any "well-established" organization, getting approval to install a new shell will range from "12 to 24 months" to "impossible". And without that, I'm not going to put in the effort to learn a new tool that is only useful some of the time and requires massive context switching.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_shell#:~:text=Stephen%2...

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3. BadBad+XN[view] [source] 2026-01-07 19:26:57
>>mmh000+NG
That's what I mean. A new shell would need to blow me away with some amazing must have interactive feature. The scripting part is, at least for me, not really relevant. If I can install software on the target I will install a proper language and if not then it will be bash or sh anyways, even though they properly suck.
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4. ZenoAr+N81[view] [source] 2026-01-07 20:53:47
>>BadBad+XN
The "killer app" is that it's easy to string together multiple commands and have them work more reliably than shells that rely on plaintext. In other words, it's something in-between running individual commands and writing full scripts. I've not used Nushell before, but I'm very familiar with PowerShell which is similar, and it's ridiculously easy to manipulate and explore your file system with confidence that you don't have to rely on hacky and hard to read regex and similar suboptimal solutions.
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