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Comment by abhinavk | Hacker News Reader

I have recently switched to using Nushell as my default shell. They were also writing their own but recently decided instead to begin incorporating github.com/uutils/coreutils (Rust rewrite of GNU coreutils). They target uutils to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils. Differences with GNU are treated as bugs.

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A commendable effort but to me they are not going far enough. I'd honestly just start over, implement what seems to make sense and only add extra stuff on top if there's a huge demand for it + that demand is well-argumented for.

I get why they don't want to do that and I respect their project a lot. But to me imitating this ancient toolchain is just perpetuating a problem.

Agree, I had the same thought reading the above comments. GNU is not holy correctness, it’s a first draft that worked well. Opinionated reimplementation with divergence isn’t a bad thing.

Trust me, if we were all starting from scratch, I would agree. However, I am not ready to drop compatibility with GNU coreutils at the moment.

Nobody is forcing you to. We can have alternative stacks for as long as we like. Any new stack is strictly opt-in.

I mention "GNU compatibility" for Bun Shell specifically because there are some incredibly commonly used GNU extensions even in the JS ecosystem like mkdir -p, and yes, even the GNU specific find extensions. I don't think we need total compatibility for everything. However, OTOH, Nushell is targeting being the default system shell, not just something off to the side. They could decide to be not GNU compatible and it's not like I'd complain, but I agree with their choice to be GNU compatible 100%, and it makes me more likely to consider it on my own machines.

I don't feel as though anyone is forcing me to do anything though, that's definitely not the tone I intended to convey.

I get where you're coming from, but there's an enormous ecosystem of software written for posix. You wouldn't just be starting over with new standards.. you'd be tossing out a whole world of software that we already have.

Well, I was more talking about just having an extra terminal program that launched an alternative shell (like oilshell / nushell etc.) and occasionally migrate one of your legacy scripts to that and see if it fits.

I am definitely not advocating for a switch overnight. That would of course be too disruptive and is not a realistic scenario.

In terms of POSIX I'd start with just removing some of the quirkiest command line switches and function arguments. Just remove one and give it 3 months. Monitor feedback. Rinse and repeat.

That's what I would do.

They can bait first and switch later.

I mean, there are certain projects that do that, eg. I'd consider ripgrep to be "grep but done right"

Yeah, this is nice but also sad. GNU coreutils is ancient at this point. I know this is probably critical to get user share for nushell and not enough dev resources etc. but I’d wish they were innovating on this front too with simpler and less bloated coreutils, as they are already completely changing the shell paradigm.

It doesn't have to be an either-or proposition Yes?

People are free to experiment with alternative cli utils which are not burdened by backward compatibility while nushell also remains easily adoptable by users who are accustomed to coreutils.

Well yeah, but there’s always something to forcing people to move on to the next thing. I know I’m asking for too much.

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

I agree. I also increasingly find myself using bat, ripgrep, eza etc even with zsh.

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