

I love Nushell, it’s so much more pleasant for writing scripts IMO. I know some people say they’d just use Python if they need more than what a POSIX shell offers, but I think Nushell is a perfect option in between.
With a Nushell scripts you get types, structured data, and useful commands for working with them, while still being able to easily execute and pipe external commands. I’ve only ever had two very minor gripes with Nushell, the inability to detach a process, and the lack of a -l
flag for cp
. Now that uutils supports the -l
flag, Nushell support is a WIP, and I realized systemd-run is a better option than just detaching processes when SSHd into a server.
I know another criticism is that it doesn’t work well with external cli tools, but I’ve honestly never had an issue with any. A ton of CLI tools support JSON output, which can be piped into from json
to make working with it in Nushell very easy. Simpler tools often just output a basic table, which can be piped into detect columns
to automatically turn it into a Nushell table. Sometimes strange formatting will make this a little weird, but fixing that formatting with some string manipulation (which Nushell also makes very easy) is usually still easier than trying to parse it in Bash.
Xonsh is also a really cool option. If I used Python more regularly and was more comfortable using it without having to look stuff up, I’d probably use it over Nushell.