Nushell 0.36

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 0.36 of Nu. This release fixes some long-standing issues with history, improves the help system, improves dataframes, and much more.

Where to get it

Nu 0.36 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

Help now has search (fdncred)

You can now use help -f <term> and search the help for text. This can come in handy if you know roughly what you want but can't remember the name of the command:

> help -f string
────┬──────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────┬─────────────
 #  │           name           │                     usage                      │ extra_usage
────┼──────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────
  0 │ ansi strip               │ strip ansi escape sequences from string        │
  1 │ build-string             │ Builds a string from the arguments.            │
  2 │ dataframe concatenate    │ [Series] Concatenates strings with other array │
  3 │ dataframe contains       │ [Series] Checks if a pattern is contained in a │
    │                          │ string                                         │
  4 │ dataframe replace        │ [Series] Replace the leftmost (sub)string by a │
    │                          │ regex pattern                                  │
...

Built-in tutor (sophiajt)

In addition to the new help search, we've also started to build out a built-in Nushell tutorial. You can navigate by topic or search the help text for a string.

We've only added a few topics so far, but we hope to grow these topics (with your help) over the coming releases.

New commands and features

• drop nth - drops the given rows (andrasio)
• PROMPT_STRING environment variable - configures the script to run to create the prompt directly from the environment (elferherrera)
• zip - combine two lists into one list of pairs (andrasio)

Dataframe improvements (elferherrera)

• datetime commands
• describe command
• rolling and cumulative commands

Important bugfixes (lily-mara, gwenn, sophiajt)

A long-standing issue with history getting garbled when you have multiple shells open sending history updates is hopefully now fixed. Thanks to the rustyline maintainers for helping find the root cause and creating a fix for it.

Additional improvements

• waldyrious fixed a typo, and fixed issue templates
• fdncred started a list of projects that officially support Nushell
• RealCundo added PartialEq to ReturnValue
• hedonihilist improved how DirInfo calculates directory size
• soumil-07 worked around a BigDecimal issue that broke math floor
• sophiajt added in and not-in for strings, changed the release build to focus on binary size
• baoyachi updated shadow-rs, which fixes some datetime issues and more
• knottio added trailing slash when completing symlinked directory
• fdncred fixed fetch to better follow redirects, and improved the issue template
• filaretov fixed unaliasing to only affect the current scope
• kubouch fixed an issue where source couldn't handle paths with emojis

Looking ahead

The ability to search help and improve a built-in tutorial gives us a lot of opportunities to make Nushell more user-friendly, especially to users who are just getting started learning what Nushell can do. If you're interested, these are some good places to jump in and help if you have specific topics or areas of interest.

The projects we reported on last time, engine-q and reedline, are steadily improving. We're currently working through any remaining issues so that we can begin experimenting with integrating them into Nushell.