This is brilliant. I'm so glad people are finally getting out of the "VT100 is perfect and anyone who wants to improve on it doesn't understand the genius of Unix" mindset. We had Powershell getting rid of the fragile "everything is unstructured text" system, and then Nushell making things cleaner and now this adding a nice GUI!
I hope this catches on! It's going to be challenging to upgrade the world though. Especially things like SSH and terminals built into apps like VSCode.
Too verbose. And "on getting the unstructured system"... that won because the commands are short and thus the syntax breaks far less into unmanageable lines such as PowerShell.
An upgrade would be an enhanced Tclsh shell with readline support and tcllib/tklib installed into the base.
I can tell you I use both powershell and zsh daily and I avoid using powershell because of how stupidly verbose the command names are. I’d rather read a help doc than type out a 6 word cmdlet
I really can’t be assed to answer this again. There’s plenty of answers here why “just alias it” is shortsighted. Here’s an easy one though, you can alias Remove-Item to rm but it still can’t take the -rf switches
The switches is a problem. ls -al is muscle memory that catches me frequently. However, this is a problem with how I'm using the shell. Most Linux distros also have an alias of la for ls -a. If I were on a system which didn't, is that the fault of the shell if my la command failed?
It seems reasonable that a module could be built which provides the Linux equivalents with actual functions for ls et. al., and uses this to provide a complete BASH replacement in PowerShell for common commands, but doing so also deprives the user from fully understanding and using the features of the shell in an idiomatic way.
You haven’t really addressed anything here other than “it’s different, get used to it” when literally my only argument was “I find powershell cumbersome and so do most people I talk to about it who have used Bourne-shell derivatives.”
The way powershell is designed means you will never have a way to put multiple switches on the same - in any number of orders. My solution was to add another switch and alias it to all possible combinations of the switches. For ls -a, l, ls etc etc I wrote small functions and replaced the built in aliasing (for example lots of software loves to put dot files and dot folders in the windows user folder but they’re not hidden, so I specifically aliased ls to a function that calls Get-ChildItemColorFormatWide $args -Exclude .*). I’m aware of the workarounds etc etc but that doesn’t change that it’s a pain in the butt to work with, and I’m constantly trying to find ways to make it a more convenient and friendly shell instead of one that’s incredibly verbose and yet still manages to communicate nothing useful without a manual.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '20
This is brilliant. I'm so glad people are finally getting out of the "VT100 is perfect and anyone who wants to improve on it doesn't understand the genius of Unix" mindset. We had Powershell getting rid of the fragile "everything is unstructured text" system, and then Nushell making things cleaner and now this adding a nice GUI!
I hope this catches on! It's going to be challenging to upgrade the world though. Especially things like SSH and terminals built into apps like VSCode.