hallettj

This is what I use. Or if you don’t need image/PDF embedding or mobile support then VimWiki is a similar solution that is FOSS.

Steam Decks run Linux. (The specific DE is KDE Plasma I think.) So you can find answers by searching for “Linux” if searching for “Steam Deck” doesn’t get results.

One way is to enable the “Compose” key which lets you enter special characters or sequences by typing switches of more commonly-available characters. I think the Steamdeck OS has a setting for this; but I don’t have one so I can’t check.

For letters with umlauts you press (and release) Compose, then type a double quote (need to hold shift for this part), then type a vowel.

For reference Wikipedia has a list of Common Compose Combinations

Alternatively if you can map an AltGr key I’ve read you can type umlauts by typing AltGr+[ and then typing a vowel. There might be a setting for this too.

Thanks for the tip about nu_scripts, those look handy!

The expand command is nice. I don’t see how to use it to my mv command work. But that’s not a huge deal.

So maybe this is too much of a kludge, but I happened to see that you can define custom sub-commands to extend existing commands. You can use that to reproduce your familiar command:

def "ls -lrt" [] {
  ls | sort-by modified | reverse
}

Of course this does not capture the usual composability of those switches.

Well I might be hooked. It didn’t take me long to reproduce the niceties in Nushell I’m used to from my zsh config. Some of the important parts were setting up zoxide with a key binding for interactive mode, switching on vi key bindings, setting up my starship prompt.

Home Manager is preconfigured for the above integrations which made things easier.

One feature that is missing that I like to use is curly brace expansion to produce multiple arguments. For example,

$ mv *.{jpg,jpeg}

Unless there is a way to do something like this in Nushell that I haven’t seen yet?

Something I enjoyed was automating a sequence of steps I’ve been running a lot lately due to a program that often partially crashes,

def nkill [name_substring] {
  ps | where name =~ $name_substring | each { |p| kill $p.pid; $p }
}

I realized after writing this that I basically recreated killall -r. But it’s nice that it was so easy to make a custom command to do a very specific thing. And my version gives me a nice report of exactly what was killed.

Thanks for making this post OP! When I’ve heard mentions of Nushell I’m the past I think I conflated it with Powershell, and wrote it off as a Windows thing. (Maybe because it’s introduced as being “like Powershell”.) But now that I see that it’s cross-platform I’m enjoying digging into it!

I think the best way to get an idea is to look at feature lists for fancy shells like zsh or fish. But in short there are a number of things a good shell can do to help to execute commands faster and more easily. Stuff like autocompletions which make you faster, and also make things more discoverable; fuzzy searching/matching; navigating command history; syntax highlighting which helps to spot errors, and helps to understand the syntax of the command you’re writing.