Nushell 0.85

Nushell, or Nu for short, is a new shell that takes a modern, structured approach to your command line. 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 command line pipelines.

Today, we're releasing version 0.85 of Nu. This release adds the first uutils command, unlocks more constant evaluation at parse time, and polishes many commands.

Where to get it

Nu 0.85 is available as pre-built binaries or from crates.io. If you have Rust installed you can install it using cargo install nu.

NOTE: The optional dataframe functionality is available by cargo install nu --features=dataframe.

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

Themes of this release / New features

Nushell + Uutils = ❤️

📢The Nushell team is thrilled to announce 🥳 that we've begun working with the uutils/coreutils team on integrating some of their foundational core utilities into nushell. With this release, we've started with the coreutils cp command, which we've temporarily named ucp. We're starting with ucp to allow broad testing while the current nushell cp command remains the default. We've already found one bug in the coreutils cp command and you might find others. Once it stabelizes, probably with the 0.86.0 release, we'll remove the nushell cp command and rename ucp to cp. In keeping with the nushell style, we've only added a handful of parameters. We can, and probably will, add more if the community determines we need them. We're so very excited and would like to thank terts, from the coreutils team, for his excellent help and special appreciation to dmatos2012 for the, very iterative, first uutils/coreutils integration PR #10097 for the cp command. To read more about how this came to be, checkout our blog post.

Quite a few bug fixes

Thanks to all the contributors below for helping us solve issues and bugs 🙏

authordescriptionurl
@rgwoodFix watch not detecting modifications on Windows#10109
@ito-hirokiFix tab completion order of directories to consistent with order of files#10102
@herobsFix 9156 endian consistency#9873
@ayax79fixed usages of deprecated chrono DateTime::from_utc#10161
@zhiburtFix #10154#10162
@ofekFix example history command pipeline#10220
@dead10ckFix unit tests on Android#10224
@amtoinefix default after an empty where#10240
@IanManskeFix rm on macOS#10282
@horasalhandle empty pipeline while parsing let (fix Issue10083)#10116
@dmatos2012Fix variables not allowed in ucp#10304
@sholderbachUpdate crates-ci/typos and fix new typos#10313
@GomesGoncalofix #10319: allow json request of value type list#10356
@sophiajtfix 'let' to properly redirect#10360
@amtoinefix the pretty printing of failing tests in std#10373
@J-Kappesfix input --until-bytes: now stops at any of given bytes#10235
@zhiburtnu-table: Fix expand table unnecessary color in trail head config when wrap is used#10367
@fdncredfix some new chrono warnings#10384
@horasalprevent crash when use redirection with let/mut#10139
@horasalAllow operator in constants#10212
@zhiburtnu-table: Patch restore lead trail space bg color#10351
@zhiburtnu-table: Strip custom color in the header when used on border#10357

Consistent use of float for our floating point type

Breaking change

See a full overview of the breaking changes

Nushell currently supports two types to represent numbers without units: int for integer numbers and float for floating point numbers. The latter type was in important places incorrectly referred to as decimal. This hid the fact that as floating point numbers they have limited precision in some circumstances but higher performance compared to a decimal-encoded number.

With this release we fix this inaccuracy.

This means we introduce the commands into float and random float and deprecate the commands into decimal and random decimal. The old commands will be removed with the next release but continue to work for this release with a warning. Please use into float instead of into decimal and random float instead of random decimal.

After the type returned by describe has been float for a while, we now also change which type name is allowed when specifying command argument or input/output types.

# Argument with a specific type
def foo [bar: float] {}
# Command taking only floating point input from the pipeline and returning the same type.
def baz [] float->float {}

Previously both float and decimal were supported in those positions.

Some updates on explore

Breaking change

See a full overview of the breaking changes

The explore built-in commands have changed a bit during this release.

Now, it supports Vim bindings out of the box thanks to @amtoine in #9966. @rgwood has simplified the available configuration entries which used to make the command less easy to understand in #10258#10259 and #10270.

Thanks to him again, one can now quit the explorer by hitting any of ctrl+c, ctrl+d or ctrl+q (see #10257).

Improvements to parse-time evaluation

Conditional source and use is now possible.

The Nushell core team has been asked quite a lot of times to be able to do parse-time conditional sourceing or useing in the configuration, e.g. to load different things depending on the system:

if $nu.os-info.name == "windows" {
    source "my_windows_config.nu"
} else {
    source "my_unix_config.nu"
}

The above snippet does not work because Nushell's scoping rules keep the sourced values inside the block and the sourcing would not have any visible effect outside of the if/else statement (except environment changes).

While scoping still works the same, a series of PRs by @kubouch made conditional source/use/overlay use possible:

  • #9499, allows parse-time evaluation of commands, pipelines and subexpressions (see also Looking for help!)
  • with #10326, if can now be evaluated at parse time
  • finally, #10160 makes the $nu built-in variable a true constant 🥳

What does this all mean? One can now write something very similar to the proposed snippet above! For example:

const WINDOWS_CONFIG = "my_windows_config.nu"
const UNIX_CONFIG = "my_unix_config.nu"

const ACTUAL_CONFIG = if $nu.os-info.name == "windows" {
    $WINDOWS_CONFIG
} else {
    $UNIX_CONFIG
}

source $ACTUAL_CONFIG

Looking for help!

#9499 allows running selected commands at parse time. For example,

const f = ($nu.default-config-dir | path dirname)

is possible because path dirname was manually ported to allow parse time evaluation. Only a very limited subset of Nushell's commands is currently allowed to do so:

  • str length
  • path commands
  • Some core commands: describe, ignore, version, if

We would like to expand this set to allow more commands to run at parse time. If you'd like to help us porting more commands, we'd welcome your help! Please, see #10239 for more information. Porting the commands is not difficult, but requires a bit of consideration, so it's better to reply to the issue or reach out to the core team beforehand.

Improving accessibility

Up until now, an issue for users using a screen reader was that Nushell errors and tables are quite fancy with some unicode characters. The issue is that screen reader might have trouble reading them, making the understanding of what's going on the REPL very hard...

For tables, it's quite easy, you can set $env.config.table.mode to something like "basic" or "none" and you should be good! But errors remained fancy

Error: nu::shell::external_command

  × External command failed
   ╭─[entry #4:1:1]
 1 │ foo
   · ─┬─
   ·  ╰── did you mean 'for'?
   ╰────
  help: No such file or directory (os error 2)

@JoaquinTrinanes did implement screen reader-friendly errors in #10122 which will hopefully make the experience a lot better when it comes to errors.

More support for more platforms

In this release, @dead10ck made it possible to use Nushell in Termux (#10013) and fixed a bug on Android (#10225).

Improved history isolation

Breaking change

See a full overview of the breaking changes

Like many other shells, history between open sessions can be isolated in nushell. However, the former implementation had the disadvantage that it also blocked access to history of former sessions. It also didn't isolate hints. This is now fixed with !10402 by @Hofer-Julian. Since this was merged shortly before the release, this feature isn't the default yet. The file_format has to be changed to "sqlite" and isolation has to be set to true. You can find those in the config file under $nu.config-path. Please test this so we can fix problems before history isolation becomes the default.

Enhancing the documentation

Thanks to all the contributors below for helping us making the documentation of Nushell commands better 🙏

authordescriptionurl
@Hofer-JulianAdd notice to enable develop mode on Windows#10111
@fdncredupdate query web example because wikipedia changed their page#10173
@alsurenPoint from keybindings help to the book's reedline chapter#10193
@sholderbachDocument that open looks up from subcommands#10255
@baluptonreadme: add dorothy to supported by#10262
@brunerm99feat: Search terms for use, while, and range (#5093)#10265
@amtoineadd case-insensitive example to where#10299

Help with tests

Some more technical work but very helpful to make the source code of Nushell better, so thanks to our contributors who did improve the tests, often going through the whole source base and doing tideous find and replace 🙏

authordescriptionurl
@J-KappesTests: clean up unnecessary use of pipeline()#10170
@sholderbachRemove dead tests depending on inc#10179
@sholderbachSimplify rawstrings in tests#10180

Changes to commands

As usual, new release rhyms with changes to commands!

  • a bunch of new columns have been added to the ps commands:
  • @nanoqsh has made the behaviour of append and prepend consistent regarding ranges in #10231
  • @Tiggax has started working on making select, get and reject more consistent in #10163 and #10216
  • Breaking change: math constants have been moved from built-in commands to true constants in the standard library by @amtoine in #9678
  • the into duration command now accepts integers as arguments and the unit can be specified via an option with the changes introduced by @amtoine in #10286
  • thanks to @fdncred in #10354, the commandline command can now move you to the end of the line, no need to "move 1000 characters to the right" anymore

Some table themes

Want more delight? @fdncred got you covered. He added a bunch of new table themes / modes in #10279.

echo is evolving

Coming from other shells, e.g. POSIX ones like Bash or Zsh, the distinction between Nushell's echo and print commands and the behaviour of echo itself could be confusing 🤔

  • print is a more programming-language-friendly command: it does print its arguments to the terminal directly, consuming them and thus not allowing to pipe the "output" of print further.
  • echo was only used to create values and pass them down a pipeline, e.g. echo "foo" | str length

@sophiajt made the behaviour of echo a bit more general

  • it will print to the terminal if not redirected
  • it will pass the value down to the pipeline if redirected
echo "foo"  # will behave exactly as `print` does
echo "foo" | str length  # will compute the length of `"foo"` and forward the result without
                         # "printing" it unless it's the last command being run

Pythonesque operators removal

Breaking change

See a full overview of the breaking changes

Coming from Python, things like

3 * "foo"
[1, 2] * 10

would probably appear familiar.

However, they could lead to some strange internal behaviours and hard to debug issues 😕

> [3, "bob", 4] | reduce --fold 1 {|x, y| $x * $y}
bobbobbobbobbobbobbobbobbobbobbobbob

Note in the example above, we are mixing integer and string multiplication, which might get weird!

In this release, we decided to remove the string and list scalar multiplication in #10292 and #10293 from @sholderbach.

However, we do not want to leave you without any other way to achieve the same, this is why @amtoine did implement the repeat command in the standard library in #10339

  • bring it into your scope with use std repeat
  • you can do scalar string multiplication with something like "foo" | repeat 3 | str join
  • you can do scalar list multiplication with something like [1, 2] | repeat 3 | flatten

Optimizations

#10378 Switched the default allocator to mimalloc as it's shown to reduce startup time by upwards of 30% on Windows. If it does not build on unique platforms nushell can be built without this feature, then using the platform's default allocator.

New commands

In the standard library we added the following commands:

  • std repeat as a command to repeat an element n times in a list.
  • std formats from ndjson as a way to directly open newline-delimited JSON records. You can use open for files with the .ndjson ending if you use std formats "from ndjson".
  • std formats from jsonl as a way to directly open newline-delimited JSON records. You can use open for files with the .jsonl ending if you use std formats "from jsonl".

Deprecations

Deprecated commands

Breaking changes

  • Plugin authors need to update plugins after the span refactor
  • Updated plugins need to be recompiled
  • #10235 input --until-bytes now stops at any of given bytes
  • #10333 Consistently use float instead of decimal in type specifications
  • #10293 Remove pythonic string * list multiplication
  • #10292 Remove pythonic int * list multiplication
  • #10338 Change echo to print when not redirected
  • #10259 explore: remove :config, :show-config, :tweak commands
  • #9929 Rename the types with spaces in them to use -
  • #10254 Change LOG_FORMAT to NU_LOG_FORMAT in nu-std library
  • #9678 Move math constants to standard library
  • #10231 Make append/prepend consistent for ranges
  • #9966 Add support for Vim motions in explore
  • #10042 Spanned Value step 1: span all value cases
  • #10103 Create Record type
  • #10064 Fully remove str replace --string option after deprecation. Just use str replace instead.

Full changelog

Nushell

Extension

Documentation

Nu_Scripts

Reedline

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Contributors: Sophia June Turner, Ian Manske, Devyn Cairns, Jakub Žádník, Stefan Holderbach, Justin Ma, Hofer-Julian