When comparing mksh (MirBSD Korn Shell) vs Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell), the Slant community recommends Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX shells?” Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) is ranked 5th while mksh (MirBSD Korn Shell) is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) is:
Xonsh uses a syntax which is a superset of Python 3.4 plus some additional shell primitives. Because of the similarity to Python, which is famously an easy to understand programming language, the syntax of Xonsh is pretty easy to grasp too, even more so for Python programmers.
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Pros
Pro Very fast
mksh is very light on resources it needs to use and as a result it's quite fast. It also gets better results consistently than other alternatives when comparing benchmarks.
Pro Easy to understand, Python-like syntax
Xonsh uses a syntax which is a superset of Python 3.4 plus some additional shell primitives. Because of the similarity to Python, which is famously an easy to understand programming language, the syntax of Xonsh is pretty easy to grasp too, even more so for Python programmers.
Pro Extensible
Most parts of xonsh are extensible. You can change tab-completer, prompt, history backend, aliases, functions and pack it to special package (called "xontrib") and put it on Github. The logic are clear and documented well.
Pro Portable
The xonsh shell has AppImage that makes it Linux-portable.
Pro Command history on steroids - including output
Xonsh has one feature that can be considered particularly unique. It stores not just the commands you type, but their output, and doing a search on your history (configurably) can search the output as well.
Pro Cross platform support
Xonsh has native cross-platform support.
Cons
Con Development is pretty slow
Mksh is part of MirBSD which is barely even being developed anymore nowadays.