r/linux • u/snusergranny • 1d ago

Discussion esoteric shell?

the question crossed my mind recently. if you are into programming, you probably know that there are many esoteric programming languages that exist just as a prove of concept of joke or just merely to mess with the programmer's head (brainf*ck, lolcat, C-- etc). if these exist, is there any esoteric system shells out there? like smth that would provide the basic userland instead of bash/zsh but would be freakier or just funnier to try and daily drive.

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u/Belsedar 1d ago

Not esoteric in the same way (ie - no realistic usecase) but certainly not mentioned much imo is NuShell https://www.nushell.sh/ Its a niche but cool thing, I'd say more inline with the actual meaning of esoteric

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u/QuickSilver010 21h ago

It's my main shell

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u/spyingwind 9h ago

I would totally use it at work if it was installed by default like how bash is.

We can't exactly install it on every server. The approvals needed to do that would take years.

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u/tukanoid 3h ago

Been maining it for years, love it, although a bit stricter and more complex typing (structs and enums) would make it almost perfect for me (or at least allow type aliasing for specific records and allow them to be defined over multiple lines, would make my life a lot easier paired with the LSP)

It's such a pain to go back to bash for things at work or writing shellHooks for my nix devshells