The Xonsh shell wrapped up 2024-2025 with impressive improvements

Posted by ananany 2 days ago

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Comment by ananany 2 days ago

I analyzed all Xonsh shell releases from 2024-2025 and here’s what I found:

- The shell has become much more stable.

- Operating system signal handling has been significantly improved.

- Numerous bug fixes and stability improvements across all components.

- The introduction of alias decorators allows transforming output into objects.

- The shell now has a strong design concept based on the use of the @ symbol, symbolizing a seashell (aka conch, aka xonsh).

- The introduction of the one-line importer improved the ergonomics of calling libraries.

- Refactoring of shell components made the structure clearer and enabled the use of AI for improvements.

- The releases that came out in the summer are full of long-awaited fixes and features.

Although the shell already looks solid for local use, the following areas still need improvement:

- Parser performance (although the developers have already released a Rust-based parser).

- Refactoring of the subprocess executor, which heavily depends on its Python implementation.

- Windows support requires more attention.

Despite this, the team managed to make significant progress in 2025.

Comment by ifh-hn 2 days ago

At the risk of an annoying question... How does this compare with nushell? I know this is python based, but I'm talking speed and functionality.

Comment by ananany 14 hours ago