Nushell 0.67

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 version 0.67 of Nu. This is release includes a new variable naming convention, improvements to module imports and file sourcing, and more.

Where to get it

Nu 0.67 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 built-in goodies, you can install cargo install nu --features=extra.

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

We have a new welcome banner (fdncredopen in new window)

New Nushell banner

You can disable the banner using the config nu command to modify the config.nu file, just set show_banner to false:

let-env config {
    show_banner: false
    ...
}

New variable naming convention (jtopen in new window)

WARNING! Breaking change!

In this release, we cleaned up some of the syntax parsing. The major implication of it is that variable names can no longer contain - characters in it. Make sure to rename your variables from kebab-case to snake_case. This is true also for variables created from command flags. For example, a --foo-bar flag in a command signature will be referenced by a $foo_bar variable.

Relative paths in scripts are file-relative (kubouchopen in new window)

When you use source, use, or overlay add with a relative path in a script or a module file, the path is assumed to be relative to the file, not the current working directory.

Example:

# script.nu

use foo.nu *  # foo.nu is assumed to be relative to script.nu

Writing SQLite files (fdncredopen in new window)

We added a fun way to create SQLite databases:

# create a database with a single table named `main`
ls | into sqlite my_ls.db

# same, but name the table `foo`
ls | into sqlite my_ls.db -t foo

Previously Nushell was limited to reading SQLite database files. Now we allow you to take tables or lists and create database files like ls | into sqlite my_ls.db. Currently this functionality works with regular table output from commands, table literals like [[col1 col2]; [a b] [c d]] and lists like [one 10mib 20sec 2 2.5].

Shell integration (fdncred and Tyriaropen in new window)

@fdncred worked with @Tyriar from the Visual Studio Code team on shell integration. Now Nushell will display round blue/red/gray decorations indicating the start of commands in the VS Code terminalopen in new window:

VS Code decorations

Error Messages (rgwoodopen in new window)

new command not found error message

The error message when an external command is not found has been improved. Nu now displays fancy mietteopen in new window errors on all platforms including Windows, and it offers helpful suggestions for typos and mistaken command names.

Windows cmd.exe changes (rgwoodopen in new window)

Potentially breaking change: Nu no longer "shells out" to cmd.exe for any command that can't be found - only a few known cmd.exe internal commandsopen in new window. This change improves error handling and error messages, but let us know if it causes you any trouble.

Bits and Bytes (hustcer and WindSoilder)

Nushell now has a full array of bits and bytes commands for working with binary data. @hustcer and @WindSoilder implemented the following:

Hiding Environment Variables (kubouchopen in new window)

A new hide-env command is added that can hide environment variables in the current scope. hide still retains this functionality, but in the future, we expect hide to be able to hide only parser definitions (commands and aliases). It is therefore recommended to change your hide calls to hide-env when dealing with environment variables.

Unlike hide, hide-env has a slightly different signature: It accepts multiple arguments and the arguments can be constructed dynamically:

> load-env {
    ENV_FOO: 'foo'
    ENV_BAR: 'bar'
}

> let prefix = 'ENV_'

> hide-env ($prefix + 'FOO') ($prefix + 'BAR')

Prefixed Overlays (kubouchopen in new window)

The overlay add spam command would take all commands and aliases from the module and put them directly into the current namespace. Sometimes, however, you might want them behind a prefix. That's what --prefix is for. Here is an example:

> module spam {
    export def foo [] { "foo" }
}

> overlay add --prefix spam

> spam foo
foo

Customize Added Overlay Name (kubouchopen in new window)

You can now change the name of the added overlay using the new as keyword:

> module spam { export def foo [] { "foo" } }

> overlay add spam as eggs

> overlay list | last
eggs

> foo
foo

> overlay remove eggs

This can be useful if you have a generic script name, such as virtualenv's activate.nu but you want some more descriptive name for your overlay.

It is also compatible with the --prefix flag introduced above.

Next Steps

Time for a new engine!

We've been looking through the fixes we'd need for some of the issues we're seeing and decided Nushell's core needs a thorough refactor. On this Notion pageopen in new window we started gathering ideas and design notes about features that we think should make it to the update. You can click the cards and they should expand into more detailed notes.

Many (most?) ideas are not polished yet and we need to work on the full design before we start the implementation. Therefore, we would like you to invite you to participate in the discussion. If you have questions, comments and ideas, please channel them to our #design-discussion channel on our Discordopen in new window. We especially welcome thorough design writeups. You can even "adopt" a topic and specialize in it, if you wish. And of course, later, we'll need help implementing everything.

By the end of this, we'll be heading towards 0.80 which should have all, or most of, the features we want for 1.0 and the work from 0.80 to 1.0 is expected to be mostly polish, bugfixes, IDE integrations, stabilizing the language, etc.

Oh, and if you're scared this will turn into another engine-q, this time our goal is to try to make the updates incrementally instead of building a new Nushell on the side and then replacing everything.

Full changelog

Nushell

Extension

Documentation

Nu_Scripts

reedline