Shell

Required

nushell pueue carapace-bin starship zoxide

Optional

zellij eza xonsh python-prompt_toolkit python-pygments python-setproctitle

Before we proceed further, I will quickly install my shell next, so I don’t go insane from using bash. Of course, you can use any shell you want.

Nushell
Xonsh

In this case we’re using nu ^{Just say it: I use rust btw}.

In this case, we’ll be using xonsh.

In my custom ~/.config/xonsh/rc.xsh, which gets deployed by dotter, I source some additional files, if present, in the same directory (~/.config/xonsh).

Directory~
- Directory.config/xonsh
  - alias.xsh Custom aliases
  - env.xsh $PATH / other env-vars
  - rc.xsh Main config file (managed by dotfiles)
  - user.xsh Custom code (not managed by dotfiles)
- .xonshrc Managed by conda init

There are some known slowdown issues with xonsh. For a UNIX system, all Windows files (/mnt/c) have the executable bit set, so when WSL appends the Windows paths to $PATH, like e.g. C:\Windows\System32, xonsh thinks they’re all executables. In reality, only .exes are executable but xonsh isn’t interested in that fact, causing massive slowdowns and hiccups, especially when using prompt-toolkit.

You can mitigate this issue by

manually removing all /mnt/c paths from $PATH in the Xonsh init file
~/.config/xonsh/user.xsh
```
[$PATH.remove(path) for path in $PATH.paths if path.startswith("/mnt/c/")]
```
(the user.xsh file gets loaded by my Xonsh rc.xsh file)
disabling the addition of the Windows PATH for this WSL distribution
/etc/wsl.conf
```
[Interop]
appendWindowsPath = False
```

This causes you to loose access to the win32yank.exe executable, however, as well as clip.exe used by Xonsh’s prompt-toolkit.

You will therefore either need to use your terminal emulator from within WSL, together with the native option above, or manually add the aforementioned executables to Xonsh’s $PATH.

Add win32yank.exe to the env.xsh file

windows = ["/mnt/c/Users/<username>/scoop/apps/win32yank/current"]

$PATH.extend(windows)

sudo ln -s /mnt/c/Windows/System32/clip.exe /usr/bin/clip.exe

Install missing tools

To properly utilize my shell setup, I need to have the following tools available

carapace-bin (command completer),
starship (prompt),
zoxide (smarter cd)
eza (better ls)

Nushell
Xonsh

I am personally often using Zellij, despite Nushell recently implementing proper support for background jobs, as outlined in the corresponding section of the Nushell 0.103.0 patch notes.

This adds the job spawn, job list, job kill and job unfreeze (for unfreezing Ctrl + Z jobs) commands to Nushell.

My dotfiles also still integrate pueue, utilizing task.nu. For that, after installing pueue, you simply need a quick

systemctl --user enable pueued
systemctl --user start pueued

to get started.

If you remember correctly, we set the login shell to bash when creating the custom user, so you might wonder why we didn’t directly set it to nu.

Well nushell isn’t POSIX compliant, and neither does it want to be. Therefore running nu as a login shell might not be the absolute best experience you’ll ever have.

Instead, I include a code snippet in my dotfile’s ~/.bash_profile that will let nu take over any interactive shell, while scripts, etc. that expect a POSIX compliant shell can have their way.

if [[ $- == *i* && $(ps --no-header --pid $PPID --format comm) != "nu" && -z ${BASH_EXECUTION_STRING} ]] then
  exec nu
fi

Make sure that xonsh is listed in /etc/shells (or add it)
/etc/shells
```
/usr/bin/xonsh
```
Set your login shell
Terminal window
```
chsh -s /usr/bin/xonsh
```

Special case for WezTerm

Nushell
Xonsh

I’m previously used the terminal emulator WezTerm to run WSL. There is a weird behaviour, however, with nushell, where a \n gets inserted above the prompt on every keystroke.

If you look inside ~/.config/nushell/config.nu

$env.config.shell_integration.osc133 = ("WEZTERM_PANE" not-in $env)

osc133 is disabled while using WezTerm, mitigating the aformentioned issue.

This works flawlessly in windows, but unfortunately wezterm_pane isn’t automatically set within wsl.

To hack this, i just add an export to my ~/.bashrc, which gets sourced by my dotfiles’ ~/.bash_profile

export WEZTERM_PANE=0