Nushell 0.30

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 0.30 of Nu. This release adds big improvements to performance and simplicity of the engine.

Where to get it

Nu 0.30 is available as pre-built binariesopen in new window or from crates.ioopen in new window. 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.

If you'd like to try the experimental paging feature in this release, you can install with cargo install nu --features=table-pager.

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

Performance improvements (jonathandturner)

image of the 0.30 release being 8-20 times faster than 0.29

Nu, now noticeably faster

The 0.30 release is the first to include the engine-p experimental approaches that we mentioned in the last release. These changes streamline the engine, moving it from async streams to iteratorsopen in new window, simplifying how commands handle their argumentsopen in new window, and how outputs are passed from one command to the nextopen in new window.

The end result is an engine that is both simpler and much faster. In the above example we run two different benchmarks. The first is a run of this scriptopen in new window in the Nushell script repo. The second is a tight processing loop over many 10 million small records: echo 1..10000000 | prepend 777 | append 555 | where $it > 7 | length.

Though the performance numbers are still early, they're extremely promising.

New built-in variable $scope (stevenbarragan, fdncred)

We're experimenting with a new built-in variable called $scope. This gives you access to definitions in scope, including variables.

New Commands

Documentation (andrasio)

We have a new guide on how to create Nushell commandsopen in new window.

Improvements (LhKipp, luccasmmg, waldyrious, ilius, fdncred, andrasio, DonnutPanic, ammrkn, jonathandturner, schrieveslaach, daschl, nightscape)

Breaking changes

Removed help shell

We have removed the help shellopen in new window to simplify code.

Removed ambiguous units

We've also removed yr and mon unitsopen in new window because their meaning was too confusing.

New set of default features

The default feature list is now simpleropen in new window. This means that doing a cargo install will give you fewer of the plugins than previously. We're still working to refine this list. Please do give feedback if these changes negatively impact you.

Looking ahead

The new engine and performance improvements should open the door for even more improvements in the future. These improvements also make it easier to explore adding more sophisticated completion logic in the future, as that logic could be written in Nushell itself.