this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Anyone use powershell on linux? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by Euphoma@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Or any other alternate shells that aren't bash?

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[–] chrash0@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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

[–] RoadTrain@lemdro.id 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Hi! I'm interested in trying Nushell at some point, although I keep putting it off...

Would you share your experience on a couple of items?

  1. How easy was it to get started?
  2. Do you find, or did you at least find in the beginning, that it is more suited for some particular tasks than using it as your day-to-day shell? If so, what were those?
  3. Can you integrate it with existing tools that you know how to use from other shells, like grep or awk?
[–] chrash0@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

sure!

  1. it wasn’t tough to get started. it generally reads like a normal Unix shell with some exceptions. i don’t think many Linux power users would have a hard time doing basic file system tasks or launching programs, etc. there are going to be some issues, like you can’t just paste bash commands in because && isn’t supported, multiline strings don’t require the \ character, and string escaping is totally different. those are intentional deviations that i personally agree with, but they take some getting used to. and then obviously stuff that is specific to nushell like working with tables.
  2. definitely the killer feature out of the box is manipulating, parsing, and reading structured data. the “aha” moment for me was when i needed to change a value over a thousand or so JSON objects and did it with a one liner. then i use it with some extra overlays to do stuff like connect to a k8s cluster like k8s connect (helm stage dev.0) which reads my YAML config and connects to the cluster specified in that file. or making a call to our internal package store to get the latest version by parsing the returned JSON.
  3. it works out of the box with your existing PATH (or Path if you’re nasty). you can just drop into it and it will have all the path stuff inherited just like if you launched zsh or bash. you’ll have to set that up if you want to use it as a system shell—like i do—, but otherwise it’s pretty seemless.

you can check out my collection of scripts here: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles/tree/main/nuenv

ETA: if you do have compatibility problems or need your old muscle memory to do something quick, it’s easy enough to use bash -c old_script.sh or just drop into a different shell

[–] RoadTrain@lemdro.id 4 points 1 day ago

Thanks a lot! This might just be enough to get me to actually try it!

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