this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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I've been trying nushell and words fail me. It's like it was made for actual humans to use! 🤯 🤯 🤯

It even repeats the column headers at the end of the table if the output takes more than your screen...

Trying to think of how to do the same thing with awk/grep/sort/whatever is giving me a headache. Actually just thinking about awk is giving me a headache. I think I might be allergic.

I'm really curious, what's your favorite shell? Have you tried other shells than your distro's default one? Are you an awk wizard or do you run away very fast whenever it's mentioned?

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[–] LaggyKar@programming.dev 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] Overspark@piefed.social 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, it has. I think they started out as loving the concepts of PowerShell but hating the implementation, combined with the fact that PowerShell is clearly a Windows-first shell and doesn't work so well on other OSes (it surprised me a lot to find out that PowerShell even has support for linux).

nu tries to implement these concepts in a way that's more universal and can work equally well on Linux, macOS or Windows.

[–] ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

Powershell works really well on other OSs now. I use it on MacOS and Linux daily. I might loath MS but Powershell is a fantastic shell and after working with an object-oriented shell I hate going back to anything else.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh I didn't know powershell did that too! It sure beats endless parsing errors

[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

That was the foundational concept in powershell; everything is an object. They then went a ruined it with insane syntax and a somewhat logical, but entirely ~~in practice~~impractical verb-noun command structure.

Nushell is powershell for humans. And helps that it runs across all systems. It’s one of the first things I install.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 21 hours ago

somewhat logical, but entirely in practice verb-noun command structure.

That's supposed to be "impractical", not "in practice", for others reading along.

For example, the "proper" command to list a directory is: Get-ChildItem
The "proper" command to fetch a webpage is: Invoke-WebRequest https://example.com/

In these particular cases, they do have aliases defined, so you can use ls, dir and curl instead, but ...yeah, that's still generally what the command names are like.

It's partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages out there. I genuinely feel like this kind of defeats the point of having a scripting language in the first place, when it isn't succinct.
Like, you're hardly going to use it interactively, because it is so verbose, so you won't know the commands very well. Which means, if you go to write a script with Powershell, you'll need to look up how to do everything just as much as with a full-fledged programming language. And I do typically prefer the better tooling of a full-fledged programming language...