Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
I&#x27;ve been using nushell for the past year, and I love it.<p>For a while I kept bash as my login shell and had nu as my default command in tmux. This had the advantage of allowing a bunch of environment setup to run in bash and get inherited, which allowed my overall setup to be more vanilla (and also nushell doesn&#x27;t have any kind of job control, so something like tmux is probably a must).<p>About two months ago I promoted nushell to my login shell. In hindsight that was probably more trouble than it&#x27;s worth, but I have no intention of changing back.<p>I now keep a very minimal bash config (~10 lines total) for when I inevitably need to shell into it for some reason. That doesn&#x27;t happen very often, though — a quick look at my bash history shows that I&#x27;m mostly either running stuff interactively which assumes bash, or using it as a repl while working on scripts.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t recommend nushell to anyone without a decent background wrangling posix shells, because that&#x27;s not going anywhere. I&#x27;ve had to reverse engineer a bunch of shell integrations for things like package and version managers, most of which assume bash&#x2F;zsh&#x2F;fish.<p>I don&#x27;t resent any of that work, because I&#x27;m in my shell all day, and the expressive power of nushell is so far ahead of other shells for the kinds of tasks that I&#x27;m doing in that environment. I won&#x27;t try to convince anyone of this, since the question was about suitability for daily use. If you&#x27;re into it, you&#x27;re into it.<p>I&#x27;ll just add that nushell in particular rewards daily use, because as a language for writing your own custom commands, it has a way of quickly building momentum once you get going.