Nushell 0.21

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.

Today, we're releasing 0.21 of Nu. In this version, we introduce a charting functionality for quickly exploring data, stability improvements, and some general command cleanups.

Where to get it

Nu 0.21 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 all the goodies, you can install cargo install nu --features=extra.

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>.

What's New

New functionality

Charting (andrasio)

New charting functionality

Nushell now supports bar and line charts for when you want to quickly take a look at data you're exploring. You can reach these through the new chart command.

Here's an example of using chart to chart out contributions to a git repository:

> git log "--pretty=format:%h<nu>%aN<nu>%s<nu>%aD" | lines | split column "<nu>" sha1 author desc merged_at | where author == "Andrés N. Robalino" | update merged_at { get merged_at | str to-datetime } | reverse | chart line merged_at -f "%b-%Y"

Line chart of GitHub contributions

Improvements

• rm -f no longer complains if the path can't be found (luccasmg)
• benchmark now randomizes the environment for more accurate results (tumdum)
• select now works with columns that have spaces (JonathanArns)
• math with duration now properly handles overflow (samualvanderwaal)
• mv now properly fails if you try to move a directory into itself (luccasmg)
• smarter auto-conversion to string where possible, helping with commands like clip (gillespiecd)
• added left and right padding for strings via str lpad and str rpad (fdncred)
• blink and strikethrough added to colors (fdncred)
• initial WASI support (sophiajt)
• inf/nan handled in CSV (gillespiecd)
• new xpath command that can search XML documents (fdncred, andrasio)
• rustyline paste mode no longer assumes bracketed paste (wcarss)

Internal improvements (fdncred, gillespiecd, sophiajt, JosephTLyons, andrasio)

Windows builds now use a bigger stack, suggestions have been cleaned up, cleaned up unused files in nu-data, some redundant dependencies were simplified, variable scope was improved to make way for variables, internal names for describe have been improved, nu-protocol got a tidy, added example to update, fix for panics in str to-datetime, internal name of to md corrected, empty? got a rewrite, integers are now parsed as BigInt, decimals are now parsed as BigDecimal, cleanup of old files in the root, more tests added,

Looking forward

We recently finished the Nushell survey and will be working on processing the results, which will help us plan the next few months. Also, if you haven't heard, Nushell is part of the new Couchbase CLI experience. There are also lots of big plans for improving core parts of the system, including line editing, completions, and more. If you're interested in helping out, come chat with us on discord.