Elvish shell
Ranked 12 of 12 shells by recommenders
Free shell with good support for structured data and JSON, and people recommend it as a better alternative to Bash.
Free shell with good support for structured data and JSON, and people recommend it as a better alternative to Bash.
5 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good JSON and data structure support
“it has support for more advanced data structures and also integrates json well”
Comment from 23 May 2026 in “Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby” “focus on the ease of accessing values from the json data”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig” Seen as better than Bash
“That's why there's an industry of alternatives without the faults”
Comment from 26 Jul 2026 in “A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway.” “there are plenty of better shells than Bash”
Comment from 11 Oct 2026 in “The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME”
Other shells people recommend
The four most recommended other shells, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bash | 171 | 127 | 57% | 12 | 20 yrs7 owners | — |
| PowerShell | 156 | 92 | 63% | 12 | — | — |
| fish shell | 97 | 20 | 83% | 12 | 5 yrs11 owners | Approved |
| Nushell | 92 | 15 | 86% | 11 | 1.7 yrs5 owners | Approved |
| Elvish shellThis page | 5 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
5 of the 7 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“there are plenty of better shells than Bash”
“That's why there's an industry of alternatives without the faults”
“some of their scripting stuff really is awfully nice”
“focus on the ease of accessing values from the json data”
“it has support for more advanced data structures and also integrates json well”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.