That's basically how Powershell works.
*ducks*
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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I've been trying nushell and words fail me. It's like it was made for actual humans to use! π€― π€― π€―
It even repeats the column headers at the end of the table if the output takes more than your screen...
Trying to think of how to do the same thing with
awk/grep/sort/whateveris giving me a headache. Actually just thinking aboutawkis giving me a headache. I think I might be allergic.I'm really curious, what's your favorite shell? Have you tried other shells than your distro's default one? Are you an awk wizard or do you run away very fast whenever it's mentioned?
This might be unpopular in Linux spaces but I consider Powershell for the most part well designed. I think its better suited to writing scripts than bash, but worse at being an interactive shell.
better suited to writing scripts than bash, but worse at being an interactive shell
And that's totally fine. Different tools for use cases. ππͺ
Yeah it was inspired by Powershell. But it also has syntax that isn't completely awful.
Doesn't look nearly as verbose either
Most bash fans Iβve known carve out an exception for powershell from their overall critique of windows. Personally, I think itβs not a fair comparison considering how god fucking awful everything else is in windows, but I do agree that itβs a decent shell.
Uh, this is dumb. I installed it and did a few things I would do on a normal basis. You're telling me that this is not supported? It's absolutely insane.
Nu's find builtin isn't a GNU find repacement. I think what you actually want is ls piped into where:
ls **/* | where type == file
I do question the choice to alias a well-known program with a builtin that does something entirely different. You can also use ^find to avoid calling the builtin. I would've expected \find (bash-like) or command find (fish-like) to work as well, but alas...
I don't think that's what I'd actually want, no. I want GNU find functionality for this to be a viable shell replacement. It's... neat, but it's no daily driver.
back to /bin/zsh for me!
you can absolutely do what you want. GNU find is external and since it conflicts with a builtin can be aliased or referenced like ^find.
the syntax is new for sure, and itβs not for everyone.
been daily driving for over a year
I prefer flow to futz. Thanks for the info. Glad it's working for you. I'm staying with what works well for me.
I switched from GNU find to fd 2 years ago, unbeknownst to me at the time, this unlocked nu as a daily driver, which Iβve really enjoyed for the past year. I do fire up zsh semi-regularly when needed to escape some hairbrained corners. Scripting in nu is very nice thanks to the data manipulation and closure support. So nice to move from text manipulation to semantic structuring.
They kinda have to replace some coreutils like find from scratch to be compatible with their philosophy of piping data tables instead of text. Itβs super cool and ends up being really powerful but yeah itβs a whole new ecosystem which makes it pretty much impossible to be a drop-in shell replacement.
You can use both.
The commands are object-based instead of text based. The philosophy is built around chaining commands to filter data. I'm pretty sure the nushell command would be ls ./ | where type == file
find in nushell looks like it's more for filtering the output of previous commands, not as a file search.
not my jam, but I appreciate that. I used to do 'find ./ | grep -i string' forever. I've come to prefer the more robust usage of 'find' these days, -type, -iname, etc.
Nushell is so cool! Iβm happy itβs still progressing; I was worried it would die out because itβs such a leap from existing shells that they kinda need to develop an ecosystem from scratch. Piping actual data tables between commands is brilliant. Iβve tried using it as a daily driver but it takes some work to convert existing dot files and scripts. I might try it again.
The "sort-by name" didn't work as expected though...
Looking at the screenshot, I'd guess it sorted by the ASCII values of the characters, so processes with capitalized names come up first. Still not the ideal sorting, but at least makes some sense.
Explain?
Neat. After reading the docs for a bit, it seemed like the sort of shell that would be made by Rust programmers. What do you know, that guess is correct.
It looks like powershell, but even nicer.
I love nu, but I know it's a lot for people. I can't go back to bash anymore.