[hbrid]

Interesting but I haven't seen any killer feature yet that makes me want to get accustomed to this shell. Command level completion for arguments has existed in zsh, aliases being a sort of dictionary is kind of interesting but not too useful (just some familiar syntactic sugar). Mutliline input isn't new, csh can do it, bash can do it, so can zsh. Admittedly the ability to duck type and evaluate numerical expressions with "let" is kind of nice but nothing too special. Regexes for globbing files might be a new one, certainly a useful one that I'd otherwise be writing special awk or python to handle.

[creshal]

> Regexes for globbing files might be a new one

Regexes in particular are new AFAIK, but zsh's extended globbing is already extremely powerful: http://www.refining-linux.org/archives/37/ZSH-Gem-2-Extended...

Bash also comes close, iirc.

But we use shells because of their ubiquity, not because of how nice scripting languages they are (they aren't). So I don't see myself ever using xonsh – I'm already glad when a system has bash and I don't have to figure out what "posix /bin/sh compliant" is supposed to mean this week.

[brodo]

I think the big plus is that you can use a proper programming language in the shell.

[TallGuyShort]

I've longed for a language that can run both pipelines of commands with the conciseness of UNIX shells and have control structures and arithmetic as elegantly as Python...

[evincarofautumn]

Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but you may be interested in concatenative programming languages. They’re a variety of stack-based programming languages with a functional flavour, in which the default style is a sort of data pipeline. For example, in Factor[1]:

    ! Just some imports.
    USING: accessors smtp ;

    ! Create a new email object.
    <email>

    ! That object is piped implicitly to these setter words.
    ! E.g., >>from: ( email new-address -- email )
    "[e-mail]" >>from
    { "[e-mail]" } >>to
    "Coffee?" >>subject
    "You pick the time and place." >>body

    ! Pipe that object on to the “send-email” word.
    send-email

Note how no local variables are necessary for simply plumbing data around—although of course you can use them if you want.

The weirdest thing is probably that arithmetic in most concatenative languages is written in postfix, which you may find off-putting. But it’s no worse than Lisp’s prefix notation, and has some other benefits.

Factor also has an excellent interactive environment; the whole thing feels like a Lispy Smalltalk.

[1]: http://factorcode.org/

[Tiksi]

>arithmetic in most concatenative languages is written in postfix

Postfix? I'm assuming a typo here but not sure what you meant.

Edit: Ah, I'm guessing it was supposed to be postscript. Makes more sense now.

Looks like an interesting language style though, I've been looking for a language that has the bash style piping baked into the language.

[evincarofautumn]

Prefix/postfix/infix refer to the order in which you write operations and their operands—equivalently you can think of preorder/postorder/inorder traversals of the syntax tree.

    AST          +
                / \
               *   5
              / \
             2   3

    Infix    2 * 3 + 5
             2 times 3 plus 5.

    Prefix   + * 2 3 5
    Lisp     (+ (* 2 3) 5)
             The sum of the product of 2 and 3, and 5.

    Postfix  2 3 * 5 +
             With 2 and 3, multiply. Then with 5, add.

[Tiksi]

Ahh, understood now. I figured postscript as it's also a concatinative programming language.

I read postfix as in the mail server not as a synonym of suffix, thanks for the clarification.

[rkeene2]

You can do this with Tcl ! I wrote an extension called "pipethread" to make UNIX shell pipelining more natural. It uses threads instead of processes but otherwise operates pretty similarly.

Example: set lsOutput [pipethread::pipe exec ls | exec tac | foreach line { puts $outchan "[string length $line]:$line" } | { gets $inchan line; puts $outchan $line }]

Usage: https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/pipethread/arti...

[RVuRnvbM2e]

That language is Ruby.

[klibertp]

Well, there are some other as well.

TCL works nice as a shell and is very elegant as a programming language. The famous equivalence of code and data is visible here, while still syntactically looking pretty normal.

Scheme (via https://scsh.net/about/about.html) is also worth looking into. S-exp based syntax looks strange at first, but you get used to it rather quickly.

Emacs Eshell is very similar to xonsh, but with Emacs Lisp instead of Python.

On Windows PowerShell is also a choice. It's both a shell and a sane, procedural programming language, with full access to dotNET.

Tulip (https://github.com/tulip-lang/tulip) express goals are to be good for both shell work and programming.

On the other hand, jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) is just a DSL, but it turns out it's ok for doing more advanced work if you're familiar with functional programming.

Not to mention, almost every language with a REPL can be made into a shell/programming environment given enough library support. For example Python with IPython is a very decent shell and I think OCaml with utop could also be.

[tremon]

For me, this is a shell that retains all the interactive command structures I know from sh (e.g. job control and redirection), and adds sane globbing and looping. As long as it retains familiarity with what I already know and use, it doesn't need a killer feature for me because switching costs are low.