Nushell
What is Nushell?
Nushell is a powerful shell and scripting language with strong typing, querying, and piping functionalities.
From the official documentation; Introduction:
The goal of this project is to take the Unix philosophy of shells, where pipes connect simple commands together, and bring it to the modern style of development. Thus, rather than being either a shell, or a programming language, Nushell connects both by bringing a rich programming language and a full-featured shell together into one package.
Nu takes cues from a lot of familiar territory: traditional shells like bash, object based shells like PowerShell, gradually typed languages like TypeScript, functional programming, systems programming, and more. But rather than trying to be a jack of all trades, Nu focuses its energy on doing a few things well:
- Being a flexible cross-platform shell with a modern feel
- Solving problems as a modern programming language that works with the structure of your data
- Giving clear error messages and clean IDE support
Examples
Shell Examples…
0x[7F000001] | chunks 1 | each { into int } | str join "."
# => 127.0.0.1
ls | where size > 1kb
# => ╭───┬───────────────────┬──────┬─────────┬────────────╮
# => │ # │ name │ type │ size │ modified │
# => ├───┼───────────────────┼──────┼─────────┼────────────┤
# => │ 0 │ Gemfile │ file │ 1.1 KiB │ 3 days ago │
# => │ 1 │ Gemfile.lock │ file │ 6.9 KiB │ 3 days ago │
# => │ 2 │ LICENSE │ file │ 1.1 KiB │ 3 days ago │
# => │ 3 │ SUMMARY.md │ file │ 3.7 KiB │ 3 days ago │
# => ╰───┴───────────────────┴──────┴─────────┴────────────╯
help commands | where name == each | first | get params.name
# => ╭───┬──────────────────╮
# => │ 0 │ closure │
# => │ 1 │ --help(-h) │
# => │ 2 │ --keep-empty(-k) │
# => ╰───┴──────────────────╯
http get https://programming.dev/api/v3/site | get all_languages | length
# => 184
http get https://programming.dev/api/v3/site | get taglines.content
# => ╭───┬────────────────────────────────────╮
# => │ 0 │ Broken communities have been fixed │
# => ╰───┴────────────────────────────────────╯
Web-Links
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I didn't realize Nu had gotten any form of job control; that was one of the limitations that forced me back to a traditional shell last time I tried it.
Looks like they're still making frequent breaking changes, though, which was another thing I found difficult to manage.
Jobs are currently in-process background threads, so will exit when exiting the current Nushell process. There's plans for job dispatching though. In the meantime, the nu_scripts repo has a
taskmodule that usespueueto handle such cases.I think that's fine; I don't usually orphan background jobs, but I do relatively often have reason to have them while I do something else. And relying on
pueuefor more complex uses seems more than reasonable.