Nushell 0.86 (opens in new tab)

> if your collection isn't amenable to being generated by a simple expression like a map or fold, then you have to create a collection, prep the collection to be what you want it to be, then you return it.

This release added the ability to "yield" values via a generator fashion. It's called `unfold`, but will be renamed to `generate` in the next release: https://www.nushell.sh/commands/docs/unfold.html.

Maybe in some areas, but in terms of day to day usage, I prefer nushell

"Stringly typed" is usually used as a derogatory term for the alternative to strong typing, which often looks like manipulating raw strings when higher level code would have either better error handling or less boilerplate.

In this sense, dealing with raw bytes is worse.

There is no reason we can't use CLIs that provide higher level operations, but there's just not enough standardization.

I think they are refering to the fact that variables are always strings. You can write stuff like i=0;i=$(( i + 1 ) which looks like you are dealing with integers, but in reality, the shell only deals with strings.

You know those status bars in dwm and similar window managers? Those are usually generated from a pipeline outputting a line every few seconds or so.

To make it display something as trivial as the frequency of your CPU, the network speed, etc, you have to randomly parse some ad-hoc, program-dependent format that may be locale-dependent! If these could speak a proper language, one could just take the value of this field/object/element and be done with it.

>it's considered unwise to use a non-unix compliant shell as your login shell

I'll bite, why is this?

Quick question: what does “Unix compliant” mean in this context?

There are shells that are bash compatible, and shells that are sh compatible, and shells that work on posix systems, but I’m not sure what “Unix compliant” means.

I think you mean bash/sh compatible, as pretty much all code on the internet assumes that (a big reason why fish never really took off), and if you are putting things in .profile that expect bash (or sh) compatibility, and your shell doesn’t support that, it could do weird stuff.

Ah, thats what I meant! The shell that `iterm2` logs in with, not `chsh`. I was a bit ambiguous there.

You can bypass a Nushell command by prepending "^". To use MacOS open, this would be "^open cat.gif"

This tic drives me nuts when I hop between fish (which I use for two features, better tab completion and background jobs) and nu. With 0.86, it might just be for background jobs, which is something Nushell has avoided dealing with entirely. CTRL-Z and "bg" is just muscle memory for me, much like "open."

Do you mind elaborating on your last point? I'm intrigued by nushell and I'm doing devopsy work, I'll give it a try now but I'd love to hear how you use it and learn from it!

as someone else mentioned, the shell you use for interactive work and the language you use for scripting don't have to be the same thing. I use fish as my primary interactive shell( on linux) - but scripts for work stuff will still be bash. That said - nushell is now my primary shell for anything windows related. And I'm aiming to do any minor automation on windows in nu rather than .bat files.

Nushell is tremendously concise and elegant. This might win over your colleagues.

Python is often _too general purpose_. Everything you can do in Nushell you can do in Python except Nushell is just a bit more concise given it is specialized for being a shell language.

Nushell is cool also because it has inbuilt versions of `ls` etc. that output tabular data so it can do all kinds of fancy things with it.

I picked it up right around when this got posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576303

More or less a month ago. As of speaking, I'm almost entirely familiar with the standard API, comfortable with the language enough to implement a wrapper around openai with built-in tooling and have a configuration which closely resembles my previous zsh interactive setup.

All and all, after a month of usage, I have no regrets apart from reasonable ones like investing time into what could be categorized as personal delight but the power that lies beneath your fingertips grows exponentially with all of this functionality available out of the box.

Its been a pleasure so far and witnessing its incredible pace makes it even more exciting with pleasant surprises from features introduces waiting in every second corner

Just install, and start using it on the side. It's quite intuitive. Maybe start with the `tutor` command, then go through the guide book: https://www.nushell.sh/book/

you can start using it right away and much of your muscle memory will still give decent results. I say much - since piping with > isn't a thing, but still, it doesn't take long to get used to using it.

I'd say if you spend a day experimenting with it, you're on your way to mastery.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear here. I’m not talking about limiting the number of entries, but about limiting the amount of data pulled per entry. Just like how a query planner in an RDBMS ends up only pulling relevant columns from disk.

I also have the problem in bash, as the history is not written until the shell exits (having it write history command-for-command results in interleaving history with commands from other sessions, which doesn't work well for me).

But in bash, backgrounding works, so it's not an issue.