Nushell 0.29

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 0.29 of Nu. This release adds more polish for paths, streaming, and more.

Where to get it

Nu 0.29 is available as pre-built binaries (opens new window) or from crates.io (opens 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

New commands

• notryanb added the hash md5 command (opens new window)

Functionality

• John-Goff renamed the count command to length (opens new window)
• ahkrr bumped rustyline to 8.0.0 (opens new window)
• fdncred extended char to allow for more complex unicode (opens new window)
• fdncred also added support to cd ~/dir (opens new window)
• gonatz added forward slash autocompletion for Windows (opens new window)
• stormasm added the $scope variable to see into the current scope (opens new window). The currently only supports seeing the aliases in scope.
• DonnotPanic added timezone support for time conversions (opens new window)

Internal

• jonathandturner fixed an issue with input stream buffering for text (opens new window)
• fdncred updated the fetch command for better portability (opens new window)
• andrasio improved the test playground (opens new window)
• andrasio also improved test coverage for context and more (opens new window)
• nibon7 fixed running tests with --release (opens new window)
• ahkrr improved prompt reliability (opens new window)

Documentation

• suzanje fixed some broken contributor book links (opens new window)
• mvolkmann fixed a typo in the help text (opens new window)

Breaking changes

• The count command is now length (opens new window) for better discoverability.

Looking ahead

There are a few different on-going projects to help Nushell. New this week is engine-p (opens new window), an experimental engine that explores what an iterator+parallel approach would be like in contrast to Nu's current async stream approach. Early results are promising here, as the engine appears to perform better while also using a simpler set of patterns, which should help new contributors.

We've also posted our proposal for shipping 1.0 (opens new window). This lays out the proposed path for Nushell to reach 1.0 and beyond, including the features Nushell will ship with at 1.0. If you'd like to give us feedback, we'd love to have it. You can add comments directly on the proposal and we'll gather the feedback and use it in the next round of revisions.