I struggle with this all the time. It's easy to start with some shell commands, and nothing beats the direct terminal running nature of a shell script. But at some point you get to where you need to do things shell isn't good at, and the cost of maintaining that part can put weight the ease of direct terminal access. Especially if you then throw in the need to make your solution runnable on a lot of systems, you now have a problem with compatibility and possibly environment setup. On top of that, if you're really experienced and good with shell, the bar for "this is difficult" in shell gets further and further away, even if it's hard for someone else to maintain.

I've been investigating alternative options with bring-your-own-tool for this situation at $JOB, mostly making use of shebangs to trigger environment setup from self-contained utilities packaged with the scripts, and there are some promising options. Things like `uv` to setup a self-contained one-off python venv automatically so you can write in Python instead, possibly with one of the packages that helps with the many subcommands footguns, or to write `xonsh` if you want something more shell script leaning but with Python power. Or you can alternatively go with a language agnostic solution and use shebang triggered `nix-portable` to construct a whole isolated custom environment automatically from a flake.nix and run whatever tools and mishmash of languages you want.

Thank you.

For some reason shell and Bash is very alluring to me, but Python isn’t. I guess it’s the combination of both having to orchestrate subprocesses and having to deal with all the typical dynamic language bugs that I introduce in the process of writing in a language I usually do not use.

So then I use some static language. Which has even more of an activation cost.

I should just try a better shell than the vaguely Posix compliant ones.

You can use `set vi-ins-mode-string` and `set vi-cmd-mode-string` in .inputrc to get indicators in readline, and you can add them to your prompt with a bit more work: https://superuser.com/questions/1466222/move-vi-mode-string-...