When comparing Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) vs Oh (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 Oh (shell) is ranked 16th. 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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Concurrent
Because it's written in Go, Oh can also be thought of as a concurrent programming language.
Cons
Con Unstable
It fails with errors and long Python tracebacks.
Con No configurable prompt
The only way to configure the prompt in order to use something else other than the default >
, you have to change the source code of Oh.