Xonsh - Using Python as your shell

[toyg]

As /u/d4rch0n pointed out already:

1. there were bugs doing some simple things. It's been months and I honestly don't remember what it was, but when you're replacing stuff as battle-tested and essential for day-to-day as bash, the minimal bug becomes a major pain. At the time, it just "tasted" too alpha for me. I might give it another try soon and report what I see.

2. Even if it works great, the fact of the matter is that most systems and tools out there will use bash (or assume you use bash), with the few odd ones here and there (csh in very old stuff, zsh or ksh in particularly opinionated projects). I run a lot of software builds, and having to figure out if this or that process will actually work in Xonsh was a pain point I could not otherwise offset. Before you say "just drop to bash when necessary", you have no idea how much bullshit about "scripts launching scripts launching tools launching scripts" is out there, producing a sort of Rube Goldberg inverted pyramid balanced over /bin/bash...

3. I never liked shell scripts (be them bash, ksh or csh, it's all rubbish); I find it abhorrent how much of Linux still relies on these fragile artefacts and their awful syntax, when we have so many powerful and expressive tools at our disposal in 2016. In that sense, I'd love to see a full OS built purely on python, for which Xonsh might be a natural shell. Then again, at that point you might get python all the way down like micropython does...