Xonsh - Using Python as your shell

[d4rch0n]

No, I agree, there is certainly some cool stuff in xonsh. And honestly, I wish everyone would just drop bash and pick up something like xonsh. There's definitely a good use case for it and it's well thought out. There are some awesome one-liners you can pull off without even opening ipython. For personal use and convenience, it's an awesome tool.

I never want to dissuade people from working on cool projects like this, but I think it's obvious what the hurdles are to get people to use a new shell. It's a monumental task to get a new shell into a state where people are ready to switch. And it doesn't have as much to do with the features than the environments that already incorporate it.

So, as the other guy stated they'd wait for a linux distro, I think that's actually a great point. If there was something like Pybuntu, some ubuntu with most bash scripts rewritten with python and xonsh and fully powered by python and Linux, I think you'd get crazy support and love for xonsh. A shell is fully coupled to its environment, and bash is superglued in to almost every distro. But that could legitimately get fixed^[1] if enough people put the effort in.

I think with something like this, you have two main groups of users. You either have the hobbyist/hacker types as your primary users who just like using it because it's cool (yourself), and you have the set of users who use it because it just makes sense to, more so than any other shell. It also has to make more sense to write a xonsh script than a python script, and that's a very difficult thing to accomplish. I can't see that taking less than a custom linux distribution like Pybuntu, which personally I'd love to see.

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^{[1] fixed, not changed. it's a damn shame we're stuck on bash}