> It would be nice if we could agree that each command has --json flag (for example) which will make the output trivial to parse programmatically in any other advanced shell.

That's part of the solution, but I think a signaling layer of sorts is needed too so that the reading side knows that the data is structured instead of just bytes. So basically instead of needing explicit

    > foo --json | from json | ...

You could have

    > foo --json | ...

From there it would then be easy to have env var or something instead of explicit cmdline flag to eventually end up with (almost) seamless

    > foo | ...

Powershell Select-String has the thing similar to nu's parse. See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/parsing-text-with-...

There is also very powerfull ConvertFrom-StringData

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

> nushell seems to have better way of parsing the string-only outputs of other commands.

Yup. In addition to that `parse` command, Nu also has a suite of `from` commands that trivially convert other data formats to Nu tables. CSV, JSON, TOML, XML, YAML, and many more.

So if you're working with a program that can emit, say, JSON, you just do `some_external_command | from json` and boom, you've got a Nu table.

Parsing JSON in powershell is not that bad either, `ConvertFrom-Json` pretty much does what you need. AFAIK there is nothing as convenient as nu's `parse`