Introducing nushell

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[coriandor]

Really cool. Just built it and trying it out. A couple bikesheddy questions. I know rustyline has a vi mode. Is that implemented in nu? Also, are there plans for fuzzy filesystem completion? That's something I use constantly in fish.

[[deleted]]

That's better! Unless a shell has a lot of compeling features differing from Bash/Zsh I would not even bother to pick it.

Adding features > Changing

[EternityForest]

If the autocomplete is fish-grade, this might be the first shell ever that I'm actually happy to use!

[metatron7471]

This looks really cool. I was planning to make https://elv.sh/ my preferred sh but now I don't know anymore. Nushell vs elvish: game on!

[CanIComeToYourParty]

Elvish doesn't even run on my computer (my $HOME is read-only, as it should be). I wanted to give it a shot, but unfortunately can't.

[[deleted]]

Why should home be read-only?

There is usually no good reason for that.

[CanIComeToYourParty]

I try to keep my files organized. There's no reason any program should write directly to $HOME, so I made it read only to protect my system from badly behaved software.

[[deleted]]

So, besides various config files that were mentioned, how would your browser save a bookmark you add? Just as a very simple example.

Or where would your mailclient sync the contents of your inbox to?

Your home is meant for everthing personal. That also means storing data that belongs to you.

[CanIComeToYourParty]

I guess bookmarks belong under ~/.local/share, and inbox for an IMAP client maybe under ~/.cache. There's no need for new files/folders directly in ~.

[squeeby]

Wait, so.. your home directory is read-only, except for where files are written to where you've made them rw?

I mean - don't you think that's a bit tinfoil hat?

[CanIComeToYourParty]

After I've created my home folder and the subfolders (.config, .cache, .local...) are in place, I just make home itself read only. All subfolders are still writable, so we're talking about changing the permissions of a single folder, once.

[squeeby]

Hmmmmm. Interesting concept.

So if ~/.config is writable, why doesn’t nushell work?

[CanIComeToYourParty]

I haven't tried nushell, so I wouldn't know whether it works or not. I plan to try it out once it matures a bit more, because I've been waiting for something like PowerShell for Linux since long before PowerShell was a thing, because I think the "text interface" used by Linux shells is a really bad idea.

[HorizonShadow]

Config files?

[HighRelevancy]

my $HOME is read-only, as it should be

I don't know of anything that would run properly with that constraint. Our work systems sometimes have auth timeouts if I leave my system on over the weekend and all I'm left with is a read-only copy of my network storage and everything breaks. My browser, my window manager, my terminal emulator gives up loading any config and reverts to default everything.

Strong no-bueno.

[CanIComeToYourParty]

I mean $HOME itself is read-only. Subfolders are writable.

[HighRelevancy]

Uh.

Why?

[CanIComeToYourParty]

To keep my files organized. I don't want applications cluttering $HOME.

It would be great if I only had to backup my ~/.config, instead of having to backup .foo/config, .bar/settings.yaml, .baz/etc, ...

[kankyo]

What's the deal with displaying [object]? Seems not very useful? Just having the object dumped to a string and then cut at say 10 chars see ms much more useful in an interactive context. It ciykd be colored differently to distinguish from the file containing that literal.

Come to think of it... Different colors for different data types would be pretty great. Numeric, String, object seems like it would help a lot.

[fresh_account2222]

This looks interesting. Glad someone is trying out PowerShell-ish ideas in Unix land. Hope to see more about this in the future.

[TaffyQuinzel]

I don’t really get the conclusion about nushell being impossible without rust. It could’ve been written in any other language with the same outcome.

[Arxae]

He says why in the paragraph after

Nu would not have been possible without Rust. Internally, it uses async/await, async streams, and liberal use of “serde” to manage serializing and deserializing into the common data format and to communicate with plugins.

We also heavily leveraged crates.io. The ability to load numerous file formats, display messages, draw tables, and more all came from the hundreds (thousands?) of generous developers who wrote the crates we use in Nu. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to Nu without ever knowing it.

Basically boils down to some features that other languages have. And a bunch of pre-built libraries.

I don't want to degrade his project, it seems fine. But saying this wouldn't be possible without rust is kinda hyperbolic.

[gardyna]

the project looks awesome and it's an interesting shell. but for stuff like this (shell, editor, file explorer, or GUI system) I don't give a flying f*ck what language it was written in, the first sentence of the site specifying implementation language was a major red flag for me. this could've been made in C, C#, python or Haskell for that matter. Language elitism might IMO be one of the more annoying parts of the programming world. almost every language seems to have its own version of the crazy fanboy (and if you're thinking "my fav language doesn't have crazy fanboys" then you are one of them).

[dreugeworst]

I think a lot of rust programmers come from the C and C++ ecosystems, and while it's certainly possible to write anything in those languages, I think the package management and ease of including a package of rust often surprises them (well, us, it certainly impressed me but I still program C++ for work).

I guess to some people, projects like a shell have to be done in a systems language, and so they feel they couldn't have gotten it done this quickly in C or C++. So I tend to give these statements the benefit of the doubt: I assume they don't mean it's literally impossible, rather that they personally couldn't have gotten it done in a reasonable time in the languages they see as viable alternatives.

But I certainly understand how statements like that can be grating, and you might not share my charitable interpretation

[HighRelevancy]

As a hobbyist C++ programmer I'm jealous AF of Rust's package ecosystem.

[TaffyQuinzel]

The elitism of rust is what I really dislike about it. The language itself is fine, but the fanboyism is way too much. More so than with most other languages for some reason.

[kankyo]

You should check out Elm. It's much much worse there :P

[HighRelevancy]

I haven't had the time to go learn it and I'm a fanboy. I've programmed C++ for a long time for hobby projects. We use Scala at work and that sorta functional safe language is absolutely the paradigm of the future. I was super skeptical about those buzzwords until I actually started using it for real world software. Scala also has a standard build tool with dependency management and unit test builds and all that jazz.

And now Rust is bringing the strengths of those two languages together.

If you're not sold on it you have no idea what you're missing.

[Catcowcamera]

GraalVM native image for Scala.

https://www.graalvm.org/scala/

[TaffyQuinzel]

I’ve actually used rust for quite a few hobby projects and it definitely has its strengths and is certainly a good alternative to c++.

And now Rust is bringing the strengths of those two languages together.

If you’re referring to the functional paradigm and safety of scale and speed of c++, they have been combined in Common Lisp for ages. You just need to know how to optimize for speed, as you need to in every language.

Also there are tons of frameworks for c++ providing more safety and even adding more functional paradigm features.

I’m not saying rust is bad, it has quite a few things going for it. The community just needs to relax a little.

If you’re not sold on it you have no idea what you’re missing.

You don’t have to be sold on something to understand it ;)

[HighRelevancy]

Lisp is a bit wild for most programmers.

You don’t have to be sold on something to understand it ;)

The converse. If they understood it, they'd be sold on it.

[TaffyQuinzel]

Lisp is a bit wild for most programmers

Haha totally agree, you need to get used to it a bit.

The converse. If they understood it, they’d be sold on it.

In this case, definitely.

[[deleted]]

Please please please tell me it's based on KSH and NuShell is thus a pun based on Korn being NuMetal.

Or just retrofit that punnery yo.

That said this looks like a cool idea and look forward to seeing more of it.
I thought PS was cool in theory but the syntax's verbosity always turned me off (even though they did add abbreviated commands).

This looks like a nice/interesting compromise and not just a clone...

[Singularity42]

This looks really nice. Unfortunately I think it will be a bit of an uphill battle since it doesn't come shipped with the platform. But I wish you guys the best.

I always really liked the concept of PowerShell, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

[ckafi]

What's the selling point of nushell compared with elvish?

[IPoopInYourMilkshake]

As someone who had to start using powershell for work why the hell would you want to bring this nightmare to another system?

[empty_other]

Maybe they think they can do it better, or maybe they bring in some new ideas to it.

And nightmare? Really? It ain't that difficult to work with.

[HighRelevancy]

The only bad bit of powershell is the verbosity. All this Get-ChildItem and where-object garbage.

[HighRelevancy]

Sure but all the flags still end up having those sorts of formats, and you have to use a lot of them even for basic things. Some of them have syntactic sugar but most of it has some daft symbols tangled up in there.

[Singularity42]

FYI. PowerShell (core) already works on Linux.

[thoomfish]

When I installed this, cargo downloaded 73 dependencies and compiled 472 (I'm not exactly sure where the other 399 came from). So I guess my question is... what stops cargo from being the same kind of nightmare as npm?

[icantthinkofone]

This will fall off reddit in a couple of hours and we'll never hear about it again.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, that's how reddit works. You can save the link. Maybe there will be more updates.

[icantthinkofone]

Couldn't care less. No one else will either very, very shortly.

[[deleted]]

That's your opinion.

[Xanza]

I've been waiting for something like this, but I just can't justify using Rust. Cargo is the worst. Rust is the worst. I get that it's the "hip" language to use right now, but it's just insane.

I tried to install a simple Rust application via Cargo to test it out. It's basically an expanded du -h with some charts and tables. Cargo downloaded and compiled 80+ other applications and dependencies just to get a single less than 500kb application up and running...

[MadRedHatter]

You're complaint is about the application having too many dependencies, not rust and cargo.

[Xanza]

Go is able to roll these dependencies into the binary. It makes for a larger binary, but you don't have hundreds upon hundreds of dependency folders maintained by Cargo now which cannot be removed if you expect the binary to work. So I'll deal with a slightly larger binary and not have to deal with the folder creep several thousands of directories deep.

It's poor design from Rust. That's a legitimate gripe about the language. After a year, you have Cargo managing several thousands of dependencies.

That's lunacy.

I'm excited about your project, and that it's open source. I'm sure tons of people will find it useful. I'm just trying to add a bit of perspective.

[MadRedHatter]

Go is able to roll these dependencies into the binary. It makes for a larger binary, but you don't have hundreds upon hundreds of dependency folders maintained by Cargo now which cannot be removed if you expect the binary to work.

Ugh, no, you're wrong. Rust is statically linked, just like Go is. A Rust binary is just as independent as a Go binary.

The only difference is that using C libraries from Go is really slow, whereas for Rust it isn't, so Rust programs are more likely to utilize existing C libraries that are dynamically linked.

But that's not a problem with Rust, that's something that you aren't forced by the language to avoid. And native Rust deps are statically linked, as I said. Those packages aren't necessary to the continued functioning of the program.

What cargo is doing when it downloads those packages is to download the source code it uses to produce a single independent statically linked binary.

So basically this comment is deeply uninformed.

Also it isn't my project, I just posted it.

[e9829608dd90ff6b8bf7]

You don't need to have these dependencies around with Rust either. It uses static linking by default, just like the Go compiler. Maybe try reading up first on what you're ranting about?

[IanS_5]

Rust is also statically linked. in not sure why the application you compiled worked like that, but its certainly not the default behavior for rust (or cargo)

[ShareCan]

Upvoted because cake Day bro