Alternatives to Oils
A Unix shell project combining OSH, a bash-compatible shell, and YSH, a new shell language. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Oils
A Unix shell project combining OSH, a bash-compatible shell, and YSH, a new shell language.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Oils.
Zsh
Interactive shell with powerful completion, globbing and prompt theming.
Zsh is a mature interactive shell with strong completion and globbing, but it does not run bash scripts with Oils' stricter error checking.
fish
A shell that autosuggests commands from your history, highlights syntax as you type and has tab completions that work without configuration.
fish focuses on interactive use with autosuggestions and highlighting out of the box, but it is not POSIX-compatible so bash scripts need changes.
Nushell
Shell that pipes structured tables instead of untyped text.
Nushell pipes structured tables and runs on Windows too, but existing shell scripts do not run in it and its language still breaks.
Elvish
A scripting language and interactive shell with data structures and built-in interactive features.
Elvish is a stable scripting shell with data structures and early error detection on all desktops, but it cannot run bash scripts unchanged.
Murex
A command-line shell with native support for JSON, YAML, CSV and other structured data.
Murex handles JSON, YAML and CSV natively with script unit tests, but existing bash scripts must be rewritten.
Xonsh
A cross-platform shell whose language is a superset of Python 3 with shell commands built in.
Xonsh mixes Python 3 and shell commands in one language across Linux, macOS, Windows and Android, but differs from POSIX syntax.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
ble.sh
A line editor written in pure Bash that adds syntax highlighting, autosuggestions and vim modes.
Oh My Bash
A community framework of themes, plugins, aliases and completions for configuring the Bash shell.
Bash-it
Configuration framework of aliases, completions and themes for Bash.
Starship
A shell prompt that shows the git branch, language version and other context, configured once and working in every shell.
