Nushell turns 4 years old!

Today marks 4 years since Nushell's first public release. In that time, Nushell has grown and changed, while always staying true to the idea that started it all: being a structure data language and shell.

To celebrate, we thought we'd share stories of how people are using Nushell today.

Watching for database changes (Reilly)

I like how easy it is to hack together ad-hoc dev tools with Nushell. For example:

• In a loop: clear the screen, do something like open app.db | get some_table, and then sleep a few seconds
  • Now I've got an auto-updating "dashboard" of what's going on in a SQLite database
• Use watch to run a SQLite command whenever a .sql file changes - suddenly I've got a little SQLite IDE

Nu's useful in a lot of situations like this because it's great at displaying tabular data and working with external data.

Using a grid when you cd (fdncred)

"I have it in a custom command name lsg and then in my env_change hook on the PWD env var, I call print (lsg). So, every time I cd, lsg gets ran for whatever directory I'm cd'ing to, automatically."

Using ls | sort-by type name -i | grid -c, it looks like this:

Converting SVG to PDF in bulk (sholderbach)

"Converting SVG drawings and figures to PDFs in bulk. I like how explicit and clean that is compared to a solution with xargs in bash"

Gotta have a Chuck Norris joke

> (http get https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/random).value

Surprise, we support script subcommands (sophiajt)

"Turns out, we already support subcommands in scripts."

# adds 100 to the argument
def "main foo" [
  x: int # the amount to start with
] {
  print ($x + 100)
}

def "main" [] {
  print "usage: maintest.nu <command name>"
}

> nu ../maintest.nu foo 123
223

It even comes with its own help

Crossplatform symlinks (Kubouch)

"Here is my favorite: Cross-platform symlink:"

# Create a symlink
export def symlink [
    existing: path   # The existing file
    link_name: path  # The name of the symlink
] {
    let existing = ($existing | path expand -s)
    let link_name = ($link_name | path expand)

    if $nu.os-info.family == 'windows' {
        if ($existing | path type) == 'dir' {
            mklink /D $link_name $existing
        } else {
            mklink $link_name $existing
        }
    } else {
        ln -s $existing $link_name | ignore
    }
}

Giving your hex values some color (fdncred)

add string: {|x| if $x =~ '^#[a-fA-F\d]+' { $x } else { 'white' } } to your $env.config.color_config and you'll get:

And many more

We've hope you all have enjoyed using Nushell as much as we've enjoyed making. Here's to many more happy birthdays to come!