[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.