After a long time I’m in a situation where I sometimes work on a temporary system without my individual setup. Now whenever I might add a new custom (nushell) command that abstracts the usage of CLI tools, I think about the loss of muscle memory/knowledge for these tools and how much time I waste looking them up without my individual setup. No, that’s not a huge amount of time, but just out of curiosity I’d like to know how I can minimize this problem as much as possible.

Do you have some tips and solutions to handle this dilemma? I try to shadow and wrap existing commands, whenever it’s possible, but that’s often not the case. Abbreviations in fish are optimal for this problem in some cases, but I don’t think going back to fish as my main shell for this single reason would be worth it.

  • BatmanAoDEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    I think it really depends how much time you actuall spend working on these temporary systems, and what mechanisms are available for automatically configuring those systems, even temporarily. You can generally assume that some version of bash is available on all systems, so if you have a bashrc that you like, you could use sshrc or kyrat to at least bring over some functions and aliases (I used sshrc long ago but haven’t tried kyrat): https://github.com/cdown/sshrc, https://github.com/fsquillace/kyrat

    If you do want to use nushell on remote systems, possibly xxh would enable that; I haven’t used it personally, but it looks promising: https://github.com/xxh/xxh

    If you’re not using ssh, then it really depends what you are doing.

    • TheV2OPEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      This is cool! It doesn’t fit my current situation. The temporary system I’m dealing with now is a Windows Sandbox for a school project. While it could take a few minutes to install winget and the necessary tools, I’d rather not risk the potential of troubleshooting time, because of the limited amount of time I work on it physically (and because I’m cursed with troubleshooting nightmares on Windows).

      But I’ll have a look on xxh. It could definitely improve my comfort with servers that do not maintain nushell packages.

      • BatmanAoDEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        Hm, I’m not sure what you’re looking for, then.

        How are fish abbreviations different from nushell aliases for working on temporary machines? Surely your Windows sandboxes don’t have fish installed?

        • TheV2OPEnglish
          0·
          18 days ago

          Since fish abbreviations get replaced by the actual abstracted content before the execution, I’m more concise about the tools. And thus I’d remember the ways without my setup better. Then again, it only works for small stuff.