[photonthug]

While removing weird stuff from daily bash annoyances is interesting, I'm not necessarily looking to replace that with brand new but also pretty random weird stuff. Adding new rules isn't the same as adding structure. The documentation is also frequently strange in a way that makes it hard to digest. From https://elv.sh/learn/first-commands.html#external-commands

> While Elvish provides a lot of useful functionalities as builtin commands, it can’t do everything. This is where external commands come in, which are separate programs installed on your machine. Many useful programs come in the form of external commands, and there is no limit on what they can do. Here are just a few examples: Git provides the git command to manage code repositories

At first I thought, wait, is this a shell or not, do I have to write code or something to get access to normal external commands? But no, this is more like going to a car dealership and having the salesman say "Hey thanks for coming by, a car is a mechanical device consisting of metal parts and rubber parts for the purpose of taking you where you need to go! Now that we're on the same page about that, money is a thing made of paper for the purposes of .."

Docs are hard, once or twice is fine, but lots of parts are like this and I gave up reading. Not sure if it's AI generated, but if the project is doing that then it should stop, and if it's not doing that it should consider starting to

[nneonneo]

I mean, you are literally reading the first chapter of the tutorial for beginners (“Beginner's Guide to Elvish is for you if you haven’t used shells a lot or want to brush up on the basics”).

They have a separate set of docs for people who do have some experience with other shells (https://elv.sh/learn/); you may find the quick tour more suitable for your speed: https://elv.sh/learn/tour.html

[photonthug]

I did browse around, that's the page I got the first part of my comment from. Modules are one example of something that sounds probably good (https://elv.sh/ref/language.html#modules ). Good stuff is really weakened though by the many random changes that seem to go from arbitrary to.. also arbitrary, while destroying any chance of readability, backwards compatibility, or interoperability. Why?

> Line continuation in Elvish uses ^ instead of \

> Bash: echo .[ch] vs Elvish: echo .?[set:ch]

One more example, guess what this does: `echo &sep=',' foo bar`. Is it bash, elvish? Some combination of the two with markdown? Legal in all three? Elvish certainly cleans up conditionals and stuff, but you probably shouldn't introduce new things with exactly the same name unless you've created a genuine superset/dialect where the older version still works without rewrite. Namespace it as elvish.echo or use your module system. Shadows aren't friendly, this is equivalent to the guy that monkey-patches sys.stderr=sys.stdout to work around their one-off problem

[layer8]

Elvish is designed for use on Windows as well, where \ is the directory separator and wouldn’t be uncommon to occur at the end of a command line, so that can’t be used for line continuation. Windows (and DOS?) batch files use ^ for line continuation, so that’s probably where it was adopted from.