Or any other alternate shells that aren’t bash?

  • lordnikon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    22 days ago

    The idea of someone using powershell when you are on Linux is a form of self harm and you need to reach out as its clearly a cry for help.

  • chrash0@lemmy.world
    1·
    22 days ago

    i’m a big nushell fan.

    i was once sitting where you are. when PowerShell was released on Linux i thought about switching and read the manual. i really liked some of the philosophy:

    • descriptive names for commands. cat and ls have canonical short names to save disk space on the systems they were created for. this is no longer a constraint and aliasing a longer command name is better than “git gud n00b” when it comes to discoverability.
    • structured data. “everything is a string” is great when programs play nice. it breaks apart when programs prefer human readable output or worse don’t provide structured output, like —format=json or whatever.
    • modern control flow semantics. yes, pipes are great, let’s keep those, but why do i have to rtfm every time i want to bang out a simple script with an if-else control flow?

    i looked around at a few solutions. xonsh uses Python. eshell is integrated into emacs and uses Elisp. i briefly tried to hack something together using Kotlin Script. and yeah, i tried PowerShell.

    i settled on nushell not just because it fulfilled the above requirements, but also:

    • simple data types. string, number, list, record, and table are about the only types you deal with.
    • wide support for structured data. JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV, etc have parsers built in. jq and other such tools are made irrelevant because you just load it into nushell query with a unified DSL using common syntax like select and where.

    honestly, these are the killer features. there are so many more. context aware autocomplete, modules and overlays, super easy custom completions, extension functions (one of my favorites is git remote open), cross platform (if you’re forced to use Windows), plugins, and i can contribute since i do Rust development for work.

    give PowerShell a shot, but i think nushell is the happy medium

    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
      1·
      21 days ago

      Finally! Nushell is awesome. The infrequent deprecations are a bit annoying, but I prefer them to having a bad program go 1.0

    • Johannes Jacobs@lemmy.jhjacobs.nl
      0·
      22 days ago

      Because, as someone who dislikes MS as much as possible, Powershell is one of the few things they done right :) And when you manage mostly Windows servers and a few Linux servers, why not choose a solution that works on both platforms? And yes, perl, python, ruby, they all work on Windows too, but its just not comparable to powershell on Windows.

      So i can understand why someone asks this question :)

      Personally, i keep them both seperated, powershell on Windows, bash on Linux. But i can understand why someone might choose to go “powershell all the way” :)

      • Badabinski@kbin.earth
        1·
        21 days ago

        Powershell is a better language but is absolutely dogshit for interactive use IME. It’s SO wordy and the excessive use of camelCase is annoying and I yearn for simple GNU coreutils every time I touch it. Like, give me tail -f please, why does cat also have a -Wait option or whatever the fuck

      • Trey A@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        Understandable sentiments. I’m a MS Edge user, for instance, and despite slowly switching almost all my other services, MS Edge just gets it all right. Brave’s featureset is basically a lesser version, and Firefox is getting better, but Microsoft (of all companies) genuinely made a great browser.