I am very excited about using nushell everyday

From the moment I saw the intro video I found it very appealing. It takes the best of bash(in unix) and powershell. I will assume you could totally relate to the bash part of that sentence.

What's best in powershell?

I like the structural data flow in powershell. Since powershell commands aren't as well named for casual and quick scripting, it doesn't look good. But my OOP brain that could not master regex or awk in a decade was attracted to the named, associative data structures moving through the command pipeline.

I remember the first time I was trying to find the last modified file in a directory in a terminal running bash. I knew ls and I knew sort. I was totally in awe of the unix philosophy - individual programs doing only one thing and doing it well, composing different programs to solve complicated problems. So I tried

$ ls | sort

🤔: Oh! ls only outputs names. So I should use ll in this case

$ ll | sort

🤔: But how do I tell the sort command which property to use for sorting? Does it use size? Does it use the file name?

I was obviously missing something. I found the answer with a quick Google. There is a -t flag on ls

So ls also does sorting. That's... not... simple... right?

You get the point. So let's see how it works in powershell

$ Get-ChildItem | Sort-Object -Property LastWriteTime -Descending

I told you it doesn't look good. Ok, you can make it slightly better with the built in aliases and lowercase letters, but the most good looking you can get is

$ ls | sort-object -property lastwritetime -descending

What is happening here?

Unlike plain strings in bash, in powershell we deal with structured data. ls outputs a table with columns - Mode, LastWriteTime, Length and Name. Which I can use further in the command pipeline to tell the sort-object command to sort the table using lastwritetime property

It doesn't look like the most convenient to type but I can understand how this works and use it in more places for solving more problems than the -t flag on ls.

So... Nushell

This is how you do the same thing in nu

$ ls | sort-by -r modified

Just like powershell, ls outputs a table

But the names are much better. They bring the comfort and fun that was missing in using powershell. As I said, best of both worlds. Nushell's homepage has an even better example.

I am also excited about the speed

powershell was very slow to start. I guess it's mostly because of the plugins I am importing in my profile but it takes 1500ms+ to initiliaze after a restart, and ~1000ms for every new tab I open in my terminal.

This is after I have spent some time profiling and optimizing. I removed a few plugins that were good to have but not must haves.

I have been living with this for well over an year. Why you ask? Because I hate lock in. I remember watching all the sensible features Microsoft was bringing to Windows that were aimed directly at developers and wanting to give it a try. And then I realized I actually can't, with my current workflow. It's a long boring journey that we can talk later. But powershell was the only cross platform shell I could find to have a consistent workflow between my PC at home and my office Mac.

And nu startup in less than 100ms after I have configured it to my liking with largely same behaviors.

Besides startup, the speed while usage isn't much different. It's barely noticeable and I won't be surprised if powershell beats nu in a few cases. But being ready to type as soon as I press the short cut for new tab, feels very nice.

I also have vi mode on the command line. I don't have to Google "move the cursor back word by word in command line" anymore.

⚠️

I am still a noob in bash and powershell. And I am a mega noob in nushell. It feels like a pre-honeymoon phase with nu. So there is a lot of adulation right now. It's likely that there are a lot of sour learnings to follow. Plain text is definitely simpler than tables. So maybe we are just moving complexity here. Or this is a very good abstraction and a lot of things improve. Time will tell.

If you are as intrigued by nushell as I am and want to give it a spin, I will warn you about one key thing - The language that is used for configuration and scripting - nu is not locked yet. They intend to evolve it and mercilessly break things until 1.0. You've been warned.