I switched from Zsh to Nushell almost two years ago and I have never looked back. If you need POSIX compliance, Nushell is a no go. But it sounds like your real problem was just that Zsh was familiar whereas fish was not. Nushell strikes the perfect balance of offering the commands you’re used to but letting everything just make intuitive sense. Plus, its help command is so far above and beyond other shells. I rarely need to open the Nushell docs (even though they’re really good), and I never have to go the community (even though it’s awesome), because I can figure pretty much everything out just from interacting help within the terminal.

More specifically, he argued (and the recent and upcoming releases of most major frameworks agree) that rendering most content on the server with islands of client-side interactivity is the future.

That’s not necessarily a huge revelation, but the big difference from what people have been doing with PHP for decades is the level of integration and simplicity in mixing server-side and client-side code seamlessly so that a dev can choose the appropriate thing in each context and not have to go through a lot of effort when requirements change or scaling becomes an issue. I would say that this represents a new level of maturity in the “modern” web frameworks where devs can choose the right technology for every problem to serve their users best.

I think you would be pleasantly surprised by the direction web dev is moving if you gave it a chance.

For example, I suspect that you think one of the ways the web has gotten shittier is because sites are too bloated and JavaScript frameworks are too heavy and slow.

One of the key takeaways is that, across almost all frameworks and stacks, web dev is moving back to doing as much work on the server-side as possible, while retaining the minimum necessary interactivity via Islands of Interactivity with much lighter JavaScript than what was pushed for the last decade.

Have you tried developing a GUI app for Windows in the last 5 years? All the official first-party frameworks are either mostly deprecated (WPF, WinForms), or half-baked and despised by every developer I’ve talked to about them (MAUI).

I’ll stick with nushell for terminal-first data interactions.

I think the point is that they don’t want to have to use a full JS framework (which is what HTMX is) for this behavior.

And this is where HTMX fits in. It’s an elegant and powerful solution to the front-end/back-end split, allowing more of the control logic to operate on the back-end while dynamically loading HTML into their respective places on the front-end.

But for a tech-luddite like me, this was still a bit too much. All I really want to do is swap page fragments using something like AJAX while sticking to semantically correct HTML.

EDIT: Put another way, if you look at HTMX’s "motivation"s:

motivation

• Why should only <a> & <form> be able to make HTTP requests?
• Why should only click & submit events trigger them?
• Why should only GET & POST methods be available?
• Why should you only be able to replace the entire screen?

By removing these constraints, htmx completes HTML as a hypertext

It seems the author only cares about the final bullet, and thinks the first three are reasonable/acceptable limitations.

If you dig the structured output of powershell, you might want to check out Nushell. It’s a cross-platform shell that bulls on powershell’s structured data approach but is much less verbose and, in my opinion, more intuitive than both powershell and Posix shells.

I mean yes, but also the idea is that the user of serverless doesn’t have to configure, provision, maintain, etc. any server. You as the user just provide the code, and their platform handles running it on a server when needed.

I’ve been daily driving for right around a year now. There have been less breaks and difficulties than I expected from pre-1.0 software and it has made my shell experience so delightful!

I find that when I want to do something simple quickly, nushell enables me to do it with no context switching, little to no friction, and no googling. I can just open/http get my data, pipe it through a really straight forward pipeline that practically writes itself with how clear the commands are, and save it in whatever format is convenient to me. I don’t have to monkey around with Python and packages and virtual environments, and I don’t have to spend 75% of my time googling and debugging insane bashisms. Nushell just works, and the help is so convenient I almost never have to go to the docs.

My absolute favorite feature is that it’s truly cross-platform. I don’t have to install a compatibility layer like minGW on Windows, I can just make it my default shell and it works great. Then I can use it the exact same way in WSL, macOS, and Linux.

The reasons to not be interested in nushell imo are:

1. You’re already comfortable to the point of mastery with bash/zsh/fish, so the ease of use and quality of life improvements from nushell won’t be as valuable to you compared to the cost of switching.
2. You spend more time in the shell on random servers you don’t want to customize than you do in your own shell. Obviously we are (infinitely?) far away from nushell becoming a default on any platform, so if you aren’t gonna be able to install in the places you would want it most, you’ll just end up infuriated that nothing else is as good as it.

I already knew most of this, but only after painfully crawling MS docs for many hours until my eyes were crossed and the word configuration lost all meaning. This is such an excellent summary with extremely useful and operable details. It’s very clearly written and it has a perfect mix of enlightening diagrams.

I’m definitely making this mandatory reading for new team members from now on.