Nushell + Uutils = ❤️

We're happy to announce that with Nushell release 0.85.0, scheduled to be released on Sept 19, 2023, the nushell team is starting to integrate uutils/coreutils into nushell. The first command we have integrated is cp, that for a testing period lives in ucp. So, when you use ucp in this release, you're using the same code that it used in coreutils. 🎉 🥳

Many thanks to @tertsdiepraam, from the uutils team, and nushell + coreutils contributor, @dmatos2012 for creating this first integration PR.

But why?

Nushell has been around since its first public release on August 23rd, 2019. I think it's pretty safe to say that the concept of nushell has remained the same throughout the years, but wow have the internals changed. We've added commands, polished commands, removed commands, all to make nushell more composable and cohesive.

The story with open source remains the same. Contributors from a variety of backgrounds come in and submit pull requests. These PRs are usually things that author enjoys working on, because, let's admit it, people work on what they love and where their interest lies.

Watching Discord and GitHub Issues over the years, I began to see a trend. Some commands got a lot of attention, while others were mostly ignored. I think this must be a very common experience with open source maintainers.

One day, I had enough. I was so sick and tired of seeing issues and answering Discord questions, specifically around the nushell fileio idiosyncrasies, with commands like cp, mv, rm that I went and decided to integrate coreutils. My thought process was, "Why are we reinventing the wheel? There already is an excellent team of rust developers over at the uutils/coreutils repo who have done this. For these nushell commands, that don't get much love, but are the work-horses of a shell, why don't we use their code?". And that's how the idea was born.

The idea being, let nushell be nushell, parsing the parameters, nice command completions, and giving beautiful help & error messages, and just integrate crates from top notch developers, like we already do. Once I started digging into coreutils and looking at @Sophia's early integration prototype/port of df, I was super pumped because the coreutils team had already started to make this easier for us. They did this by creating a crate for each utility. So, that means we could probably integrate the commands one at a time.

The more I investigated this, the more excited I got and decided to put up a draft PR to sketch out some ideas and integrating uu_cp. Soon after I noticed @tertsdiepraam joined Discord. I was thrilled to see one of the coreutils maintainers join our community. We struck up a quick friendship, and I created a PR on the coreutils repo proposing an integration. After a little bit @dmatos2012 joined in the conversation and started working on a PR based on my draft. I was happy to see people joining, that were as excited as I was at the potential this could have.

Fast forward a few weeks and we had a nushell core-team meeting with @tertsdiepraam and @dmatos2012 joining. We discussed what we wanted to do and the implementation was completed. To stay true to nushell, we didn't implement cp with the 30+ switches that it has right now in the uu_cp crate. We implemented the 8 parameters we thought would be most popular. This doesn't mean that we can't implement more, but we wanted to stick with the core functionality that we thought our community needed.

I think this is going to be a huge win-win, because nushell gets to benefit from the awesome code base in coreutils with all the talented contributors over there, and coreutils gets more exposure for being built into nushell. Not to mention, that doing the integration required the coreutils team to make things more modular, which means, it should be easier now for others to integrate their excellent utilities.

What's next

First things first you can try out ucp as your regular cp by setting alias cp = ucp. After we made sure to iron out the kinks, cp will become the ucp implementation.

The next step is to move onto integrating other commands, your help is welcome and needed!!! I've created a list of command and we've categorized them as crawl, walk, run. We use this nominclature to describe that we want to start with the really "easy" commands first, then the next "easiest", then finally, what's left. @Sophia has helped me to learn the value of crawl, walk, run over the years, and that mantra frequently helps our team decide how we should implement new features.

We don't plan on implementing every command from coreutils, but there are quite a few in the crawl category right now that shouldn't be super difficult to build in.

The next commands planned to implement, based on my notes above, are probably mv and rm. Here's the spreadsheet with categories.

Parting words

Again, thanks so much to the maintainers of uutils/coreutils. They have made great efforts to be as welcoming as possible to nushell. They have been wonderful to work with and we, at nushell, look forward to working more with them. If you'd like to contribute to the awesome coreutils project, you can find it here. I'm sure they'd love your support. If you'd like to chat with the nushell team about this on Discord, feel free to join in on the conversation here.

Sincerely, Darren Sept 5th 2023