{"slug": "nushell", "name": "Nushell", "category": "terminal", "category_name": "Terminal and shell", "description": "Cross-platform shell that pipes structured data like tables and records between commands.", "recommenders": 14, "commenters": 18, "warners": 1, "score": 12.713, "rising": 2.05, "first": "2025-12-12", "latest": "2026-10-27", "why": "Loved for passing structured tables and records between commands and for writing scripts more reliably than in Bash.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 15, "neutral": 1, "compare": 2, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 5], "listed": true, "loved": ["Structured pipelines", "Better than Bash"], "caveat": "Not preinstalled", "short_quote": "I'll take this as an uninvited opportunity to plug nushell.", "icon": true, "domain": "nushell.sh", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.nushell.sh/", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Nushell", "nushell"], "verdict": [{"text": "Loved for passing structured tables and records between commands", "cites": [{"id": 800711378, "item_id": 50044461, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50044461", "by": "malux85", "date": "2026-10-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Passes structured tables and records between commands : avoids fragile parsing of text with awk/grep.", "excerpt": "The widwit answer: \"Dont do X\" (and nothing more) The enlightened answer \"You should use A, B or C for these reasons\" Even though bash is installed on many systems, I try to encourage people to use better designed shells that have less of these footguns : Fish (https://fishshell.com/): No implicit word splitting : spaces in variables won't unexpectedly become separate arguments. Zsh (I use this: https://ohmyz.sh/): A", "context": "", "use_case": "shell", "switched_from": "bash", "story": "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"}, {"id": 800270272, "item_id": 50016892, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50016892", "by": "sigbottle", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nushell already kind of has this philosophy", "excerpt": "How hard do you think it would be to rewrite a large subset of userspace tools to codesign with a completely new terminal protocol? I feel like in the age of personal computing, this should be possible and would be nice if it were possible. Nushell already kind of has this philosophy - there is a separation between the actually scripting of tools (prints out structured json), and the visualization back to the user if", "context": "", "use_case": "structured shell output", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)"}, {"id": 803063185, "item_id": 50191449, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50191449", "by": "d3Xt3r", "date": "2026-10-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "if I really wanted the structured output of PS, I would run Nushell instead, which is far more consistent and useful", "excerpt": "Windows sysadmin here. PowerShell has been great for a long time, well, since at least v5.1, when they finally fixed many of the annoying issues and limitations of earlier versions. I practically live in it the whole day - 90%+ of my work life is in PowerShell these days. But I question its utility on other platforms, because a lot of the things that makes PowerShell cool on Windows doesn't actually work in Linux or ", "context": "Windows sysadmin", "use_case": "structured shell output on *nix", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't believe PowerShell is good"}]}, {"text": " and for writing scripts more reliably than in Bash.", "cites": [{"id": 802384176, "item_id": 50149011, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50149011", "by": "farhanhubble", "date": "2026-10-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "With some practice it was far reliable than weeding out errors from bash scripts.", "excerpt": "I first discovered NuShell in 2023 and used it on and off for my data analysis work. For example, if I needed to check what unique values a particular field in a, deeply nested, JSON took on. With some practice it was far reliable than weeding out errors from bash scripts. Although LLMs take most of that pain away, NuShell may still have a place. Xonsh: https://github.com/xonsh/xonsh is another very powerful shell bu", "context": "data analysis work", "use_case": "data analysis of nested JSON", "switched_from": "Bash", "story": "Nushell \u2013 A New Type of Shell"}, {"id": 783824576, "item_id": 48989036, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48989036", "by": "lobofta", "date": "2026-07-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Switched to Nushell and I am not looking back.", "excerpt": "Switched to Nushell and I am not looking back. I don't see any major reason why we should keep dragging Bash into the twenty first century. Nushell is the first time I feel like I can write complex systems operations in a shell without having to spend either a ton of time in the docs or being at the mercy of an LLM. It is godsend.", "context": "", "use_case": "shell for systems operations", "switched_from": "Bash", "story": "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"}, {"id": 744460624, "item_id": 46528789, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528789", "by": "xpe", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use.", "excerpt": "A nice coincidence to read this; I was just telling some friends the following (lightly edited): Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use. I cannot yet discern any limit to how much thought has been put into it. I\u2019m stunned in a good way. I\u2019m writing shell scripts without any pain \u2014 actually I much prefer them to Python! With the language-server integration \u2013 I use Zed, but I'm sure they exist in VS Code and ot", "context": "daily driver after a few years", "use_case": "shell and scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Case for Nushell (2023)"}]}, {"text": " The most common caveat is that it isn't preinstalled and adds little for people already fluent in Bash and Python,", "cites": [{"id": 744475010, "item_id": 46529688, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529688", "by": "BadBadJellyBean", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I don't really know what the value of Nushell is for me.", "excerpt": "I have always struggled a bit with shell replacements. I use zsh but only because of oh-my-zsh. Apart from that I always thought of shell scripts as a necessary evil for interoperability. Today you can usually expect a linux system to have bash or at least sh. That is why I do shell scripting. Nushell is usally not preinstalled on a system and so I cannot expect it. If I want to do real scripting/programming I use py", "context": "", "use_case": "shell scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Case for Nushell (2023)"}, {"id": 744437056, "item_id": 46527316, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527316", "by": "bbkane", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm still rooting for Nushell as I think its a really cool idea.", "excerpt": "Yeah... https://www.sophiajt.com/case-for-nushell/ makes a really good case for Nushell as an alternative to Bash. Unfortunately, I don't think Nushell brings much benefit for folks who already know Bash enough to change directories and launch executables and who already know Python enough to use more complicated data structures/control flow/IDE features I'm still rooting for Nushell as I think its a really cool idea", "context": "", "use_case": "Bash alternative shell", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead (2016)"}]}, {"text": " while one user cites years-old error-handling bugs.", "cites": [{"id": 744569936, "item_id": 46535621, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46535621", "by": "yencabulator", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I recommend you don't subject yourself to software that is this level of unreliable and unbothered about being so unreliable.", "excerpt": "Last I looked, Nushell - error handling is neglected in the basic design: , , , - control-C interrupts its internals with obviously-wrong error: , is mishandled in other ways I want to make the terminal a special place for applications. The PTY\u2019s in-band signalling (an unstructured byte stream with escape sequences) is a big problem. The Nushell ecosystem tries to fix it with another layer, but we need a fundamental improvement. Many people dislike the Microsoft ecosystem, but PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data. I wish they would say more. The little nushell I used was a r", "context": "", "use_case": "shell", "switched_from": "", "story": "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"}]}, {"label": "Python alternative", "summary": "Some use it for project scripts where they would normally reach for Python.", "quotes": [{"id": 740005104, "item_id": 46250319, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46250319", "by": "mackeye", "date": "2025-12-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "nushell (https://www.nushell.sh/) is essentially perfect for this use case! i use it rather than posix(y) shells", "excerpt": "nushell (https://www.nushell.sh/) is essentially perfect for this use case! i use it rather than posix(y) shells for most projects where id normally reach for python.", "context": "", "use_case": "scripting instead of Python", "switched_from": "", "story": "Using Python for Scripting"}, {"id": 744460624, "item_id": 46528789, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528789", "by": "xpe", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use.", "excerpt": "A nice coincidence to read this; I was just telling some friends the following (lightly edited): Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use. I cannot yet discern any limit to how much thought has been put into it. I\u2019m stunned in a good way. I\u2019m writing shell scripts without any pain \u2014 actually I much prefer them to Python! With the language-server integration \u2013 I use Zed, but I'm sure they exist in VS Code and ot", "context": "daily driver after a few years", "use_case": "shell and scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Case for Nushell (2023)"}]}, {"label": "Replaces data tools", "summary": "It replaced jq, yq, htmlq and xsv for one user and helps explore nested JSON.", "quotes": [{"id": 780682432, "item_id": 48792652, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48792652", "by": "ifh-hn", "date": "2026-07-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "discovered nushell which has replaced all of these for me", "excerpt": "I used to have a number of clintools for this sort of thing: htmlq, jq, yq, xsv, etc. I was about to invest time in learning miller but discovered nushell which has replaced all of these for me. Would miller be worth learning now? Would it offer anything nushell can't do?", "context": "", "use_case": "data wrangling in shell", "switched_from": "jq", "story": "Miller 6.20.2: Miller and AI, bash/zsh tab-completion, bytes datatype"}, {"id": 802384176, "item_id": 50149011, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50149011", "by": "farhanhubble", "date": "2026-10-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "With some practice it was far reliable than weeding out errors from bash scripts.", "excerpt": "I first discovered NuShell in 2023 and used it on and off for my data analysis work. For example, if I needed to check what unique values a particular field in a, deeply nested, JSON took on. With some practice it was far reliable than weeding out errors from bash scripts. Although LLMs take most of that pain away, NuShell may still have a place. Xonsh: https://github.com/xonsh/xonsh is another very powerful shell bu", "context": "data analysis work", "use_case": "data analysis of nested JSON", "switched_from": "Bash", "story": "Nushell \u2013 A New Type of Shell"}]}, {"label": "Editor integration", "summary": "Language-server support shows script errors, including path typos, while writing.", "quotes": [{"id": 744460624, "item_id": 46528789, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528789", "by": "xpe", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use.", "excerpt": "A nice coincidence to read this; I was just telling some friends the following (lightly edited): Nushell is amazing and a total pleasure to use. I cannot yet discern any limit to how much thought has been put into it. I\u2019m stunned in a good way. I\u2019m writing shell scripts without any pain \u2014 actually I much prefer them to Python! With the language-server integration \u2013 I use Zed, but I'm sure they exist in VS Code and ot", "context": "daily driver after a few years", "use_case": "shell and scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Case for Nushell (2023)"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Not preinstalled", "summary": "It isn't available by default, so Bash or sh remains the choice for portable scripts.", "quotes": [{"id": 744475010, "item_id": 46529688, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529688", "by": "BadBadJellyBean", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I don't really know what the value of Nushell is for me.", "excerpt": "I have always struggled a bit with shell replacements. I use zsh but only because of oh-my-zsh. Apart from that I always thought of shell scripts as a necessary evil for interoperability. Today you can usually expect a linux system to have bash or at least sh. That is why I do shell scripting. Nushell is usally not preinstalled on a system and so I cannot expect it. If I want to do real scripting/programming I use py", "context": "", "use_case": "shell scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Case for Nushell (2023)"}]}, {"label": "Limited added value", "summary": "Some see little benefit for people who already know Bash and Python.", "quotes": [{"id": 744437056, "item_id": 46527316, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527316", "by": "bbkane", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm still rooting for Nushell as I think its a really cool idea.", "excerpt": "Yeah... https://www.sophiajt.com/case-for-nushell/ makes a really good case for Nushell as an alternative to Bash. Unfortunately, I don't think Nushell brings much benefit for folks who already know Bash enough to change directories and launch executables and who already know Python enough to use more complicated data structures/control flow/IDE features I'm still rooting for Nushell as I think its a really cool idea", "context": "", "use_case": "Bash alternative shell", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead (2016)"}, {"id": 744475010, "item_id": 46529688, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529688", "by": "BadBadJellyBean", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I don't really know what the value of Nushell is for me.", "excerpt": "I have always struggled a bit with shell replacements. I use zsh but only because of oh-my-zsh. Apart from that I always thought of shell scripts as a necessary evil for interoperability. Today you can usually expect a linux system to have bash or at least sh. That is why I do shell scripting. Nushell is usally not preinstalled on a system and so I cannot expect it. If I want to do real scripting/programming I use py", "context": "", "use_case": "shell scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Case for Nushell (2023)"}]}, {"label": "Error handling bugs", "summary": "One user gave up over long-standing error-handling and Ctrl-C bugs.", "quotes": [{"id": 744569936, "item_id": 46535621, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46535621", "by": "yencabulator", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I recommend you don't subject yourself to software that is this level of unreliable and unbothered about being so unreliable.", "excerpt": "Last I looked, Nushell - error handling is neglected in the basic design: , , , - control-C interrupts its internals with obviously-wrong error: , is mishandled in other ways hope some typescript-like \"typed shell\" becomes mainstream someday Might want to check out nushell (https://www.nushell.sh/)", "context": "", "use_case": "typed shell", "switched_from": "", "story": "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"}, {"id": 800711378, "item_id": 50044461, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50044461", "by": "malux85", "date": "2026-10-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Passes structured tables and records between commands : avoids fragile parsing of text with awk/grep.", "excerpt": "The widwit answer: \"Dont do X\" (and nothing more) The enlightened answer \"You should use A, B or C for these reasons\" Even though bash is installed on many systems, I try to encourage people to use better designed shells that have less of these footguns : Fish (https://fishshell.com/): No implicit word splitting : spaces in variables won't unexpectedly become separate arguments. Zsh (I use this: https://ohmyz.sh/): A", "context": "", "use_case": "shell", "switched_from": "bash", "story": "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"}, {"id": 800270272, "item_id": 50016892, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50016892", "by": "sigbottle", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nushell already kind of has this philosophy", "excerpt": "How hard do you think it would be to rewrite a large subset of userspace tools to codesign with a completely new terminal protocol? I feel like in the age of personal computing, this should be possible and would be nice if it were possible. Nushell already kind of has this philosophy - there is a separation between the actually scripting of tools (prints out structured json), and the visualization back to the user if", "context": "", "use_case": "structured shell output", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)"}, {"id": 783824576, "item_id": 48989036, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48989036", "by": "lobofta", "date": "2026-07-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Switched to Nushell and I am not looking back.", "excerpt": "Switched to Nushell and I am not looking back. I don't see any major reason why we should keep dragging Bash into the twenty first century. Nushell is the first time I feel like I can write complex systems operations in a shell without having to spend either a ton of time in the docs or being at the mercy of an LLM. It is godsend.", "context": "", "use_case": "shell for systems operations", "switched_from": "Bash", "story": "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"}, {"id": 782830160, "item_id": 48926885, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926885", "by": "foo42", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'll take this as an uninvited opportunity to plug nushell.", "excerpt": "I'll take this as an uninvited opportunity to plug nushell. Ive never got on with bash, it feels like too much of the friction is incidental to the problem, whereas with nushell I find I get to the fun intrinsic difficulty of a problem. YMMV but give it a try if you haven't before", "context": "", "use_case": "shell scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"}, {"id": 781796416, "item_id": 48862276, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862276", "by": "cassepipe", "date": "2026-07-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The little nushell I used was a real pleasure to work with", "excerpt": "> I want to make the terminal a special place for applications. The PTY\u2019s in-band signalling (an unstructured byte stream with escape sequences) is a big problem. The Nushell ecosystem tries to fix it with another layer, but we need a fundamental improvement. Many people dislike the Microsoft ecosystem, but PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data. I wish they would say more. The little nushell I used was a r", "context": "", "use_case": "shell", "switched_from": "", "story": "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"}, {"id": 780682432, "item_id": 48792652, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48792652", "by": "ifh-hn", "date": "2026-07-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "discovered nushell which has replaced all of these for me", "excerpt": "I used to have a number of clintools for this sort of thing: htmlq, jq, yq, xsv, etc. I was about to invest time in learning miller but discovered nushell which has replaced all of these for me. Would miller be worth learning now? Would it offer anything nushell can't do?", "context": "", "use_case": "data wrangling in shell", "switched_from": "jq", "story": "Miller 6.20.2: Miller and AI, bash/zsh tab-completion, bytes datatype"}, {"id": 761974128, "item_id": 47623383, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47623383", "by": "fogzen", "date": "2026-04-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Nushell and I'm always surprised at how few devs know about it.", "excerpt": "Efficiency is doing more with less. I'm not sure more tools is the path to productivity. I'm not sure it counts as a dev tool, but I use Nushell and I'm always surprised at how few devs know about it.", "context": "", "use_case": "shell", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about?"}, {"id": 760769808, "item_id": 47548113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47548113", "by": "ifh-hn", "date": "2026-03-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This use case is definitely why I use nushell. It's not 800kb but it does a lot more and the syntax is excellent.", "excerpt": "This use case is definitely why I use nushell. It's not 800kb but it does a lot more and the syntax is excellent. Not to take away from you're achievement though. But it'd have to be something very good to budge me from nushell.", "context": "", "use_case": "processing JSON/YAML/TOML", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Dop, Awk-like processing for JSON/YAML/TOML with Lua"}, {"id": 759933616, "item_id": 47495851, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495851", "by": "ifh-hn", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love nushell because of its use of pipes.", "excerpt": "I often wonder how these types of projects compare to nushell. I love nushell because of its use of pipes. It doesn't compile to native code but it is my goto for this sort of thing.", "context": "", "use_case": "shell scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flint \u2013 A compiled language to replace complex Bash scripts"}, {"id": 753455232, "item_id": 47090952, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090952", "by": "microflash", "date": "2026-02-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve been using something similar for years with Nushell.", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using something similar for years with Nushell. git branch | lines | where ($it !~ '^*') | each {|br| git branch -D ($br | str trim)} | str trim", "context": "", "use_case": "shell scripting git branch cleanup", "switched_from": "", "story": "I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs"}, {"id": 744569936, "item_id": 46535621, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46535621", "by": "yencabulator", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I recommend you don't subject yourself to software that is this level of unreliable and unbothered about being so unreliable.", "excerpt": "Last I looked, Nushell - error handling is neglected in the basic design: , , , - control-C interrupts its internals with obviously-wrong error: , is mishandled in other ways