Nushell 0.8.0

Nushell, or Nu for short, is a new shell that takes a modern, structured approach to your commandline. It works seamlessly with the data from your filesystem, operating system, and a growing number of file formats to make it easy to build powerful commandline pipelines.

We're happy to announce the 0.8.0 release of Nu. This continues a series of internal improvements, with better stability and correctness, and, of course, new features.

Where to get it

Nu 0.8.0 is available as pre-built binaries or from crates.io. If you have Rust installed you can install it using cargo install nu.

If you want more goodies, you can install cargo install nu --features=stable.

As part of this release, we also publish a set of plugins you can install and use with Nu. To install, use cargo install nu_plugin_<plugin name>.

❯ ls nu_plugin_* | sort-by name | get name
────┬──────────────────────
 #  │ <value>
────┼──────────────────────
  0 │ nu_plugin_average
  1 │ nu_plugin_binaryview
  2 │ nu_plugin_fetch
  3 │ nu_plugin_inc
  4 │ nu_plugin_match
  5 │ nu_plugin_post
  6 │ nu_plugin_ps
  7 │ nu_plugin_str
  8 │ nu_plugin_sum
  9 │ nu_plugin_sys
 10 │ nu_plugin_textview
 11 │ nu_plugin_tree
────┴──────────────────────

Unwrapping your presents (sophiajt, andrasio, with help from ubsan)

A classic trick when writing Rust is to use the .unwrap() method. This method gives you a quick way to say "panic if you see this happen". When prototyping, it's easy to use this as a way to develop code more quickly, but as a codebase matures you move away from it.

It was time for Nu to move away from using this shortcut. Fixing the unwraps is a lot of work, but the end result is a codebase that reports errors more reliably and doesn't panic as often if something unexpected happens -- which just is what you want when you're making a shell!

We're happy to say there are now no more unwraps in the Nu codebase. We have more improvements in mind, but this already is a big upgrade from where we were a few weeks ago.

Clippy cleanliness (thibran, vorot93, sophiajt)

Along the same theme of making code as clean as we can, we recently adopted using the clippy tool. Clippy is a tool to help point out common mistakes or inefficiencies in your Rust code. The end result of working through its warnings is often a cleaner looking codebase that's also a bit more efficient as a result.

The Nu codebase is now clippy-clean, and we're enforcing this on every new checkin to the codebase.

Improved

`which` gets better (avandesa)

> which which
───────┬──────────────────────────┬─────────
 arg   │ path                     │ builtin
───────┼──────────────────────────┼─────────
 which │ nushell built-in command │ Yes
───────┴──────────────────────────┴─────────

We're in the process of improving some of our existing built-in commands to make them more Nu-like. In this release, the which command has a bit more of a Nu-feel. It will tell you the path and if the command is an internal builtin command or an external command.

`ps` gets better (sophiajt)

─────┬───────┬──────────────────────────────────────┬──────────┬─────────┬──────────┬──────────
 #   │ pid   │ name                                 │ status   │ cpu     │ mem      │ virtual
─────┼───────┼──────────────────────────────────────┼──────────┼─────────┼──────────┼──────────
 250 │  4729 │ ibus-engine-simple                   │ Sleeping │  0.0000 │   3.3 MB │ 176.7 MB
 251 │  5964 │ gedit                                │ Sleeping │  0.0000 │  29.2 MB │ 496.5 MB
 252 │  5860 │ seahorse                             │ Sleeping │  0.0000 │  24.0 MB │ 488.7 MB
 253 │  6594 │ gnome-terminal-server                │ Sleeping │  0.0000 │  47.8 MB │ 675.0 MB

The ps command has gained a few new columns: "mem" and "virtual" for helping you track memory usage.

OpenOffice .ods support (coolshaurya)

Fresh off the presses is initial support for opening .ods files. Similarly to our xlsx support, this will allow you to open .ods files and read in their data, separated by the sheets.

We now support moving left by-word using the ctrl+left and ctrl+right keyboard shortcuts.

New commands

uniq (notryanb)

With 0.8.0, you'll also be able to remove duplicate rows from your tables with the uniq command:

> open test.csv
───┬────────────┬───────────┬────────────┬──────
 # │ first_name │ last_name │ rusty_at   │ type
───┼────────────┼───────────┼────────────┼──────
 0 │ Andrés     │ Robalino  │ 10/11/2013 │ A
 1 │ Andrés     │ Robalino  │ 10/11/2013 │ A
 2 │ Sophia     │ Turner    │ 10/12/2013 │ B
 3 │ Yehuda     │ Katz      │ 10/11/2013 │ A
───┴────────────┴───────────┴────────────┴──────

> open test.csv | uniq
───┬────────────┬───────────┬────────────┬──────
 # │ first_name │ last_name │ rusty_at   │ type
───┼────────────┼───────────┼────────────┼──────
 0 │ Andrés     │ Robalino  │ 10/11/2013 │ A
 1 │ Sophia     │ Turner    │ 10/12/2013 │ B
 2 │ Yehuda     │ Katz      │ 10/11/2013 │ A
───┴────────────┴───────────┴────────────┴──────

New built-in variable (sophiajt)

With 0.8.0, we've moved away from the $nu:path built-ins. Now, there's just one built-in for internal values: $nu. Using echo $nu will show you the table of current values.

Fixing bugs (sophiajt, sandorex, miller-time, quebin31, thegedge)

As always, we also fixed bugs. In 0.8.0, you'll see improvements with UTF-8, the pick command, correctly handling required positional arguments, CTRL+L clear screen, and faster response times for external commands.

What's coming

We're well on our way to 0.10.0. That's right, we're not close to our 1.0 release just yet. After 0.9, we'll continue with a release every three weeks. Expect to see Nu continue to mature and stabilize.