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.

  • 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.