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.
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?
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.
Oh, I see, so you don’t exercise your muscle memory but you at least see the “raw” commands more often.
Looks like this was suggested in nushell, and someone came up with a way to emulate the behavior manually: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5552#issuecomment-2113935091
Edit: there’s another issue for this: https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/5597
Hopefully nu will decide to implement it properly in the future.