2021-10-01 - thoughts on shells

i was introduced to the "nushell" today.

i like some of what i read in the documentation, but i don't agree with the driving philosophy behind it.

the primary purpose of a shell should be to make executing programs and manipulating their output easy and flexible.

some traits i think shells should follow:

no datatype other than strings
have streams & piping operators that work well with at least stdin, stdout, & stderr
only have builtins when logically necessary, not to improve performance
ability to bind key mappings to commands

consistency between commands isn't important if there is good documentation available for each command. nushell tries to make commands consistent, but they do this by rewriting a bunch of things as builtins. if the things they wrote were stand alone executables, their code could more easily be used by other shells.

well, that's my rant. unrelated, i was also exposed to tldr-pages recently too:

tldr pages

it's just cheatsheets for the command line. i like that idea. i'm not sure if i'll get into it or not though. i currently use my shell aliases as a cheatsheet. here is a command that uses cheatsheets too:

navi