Nushell 0.90.1

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 0.90.1 of Nu. This release adds new completion menu improvements, unifies how globbing works across commands, and improves many existing commands.

Where to get it

Nu 0.90.1 is available as pre-built binaries or from crates.io. If you have Rust installed you can install it using cargo install nu.

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>.

Table of content

• Nushell 0.90.1
• Where to get it
• Table of content
• Themes of this release / New features [toc]
  • New Reedline coolness
  • (Breaking Change!) Handling globs
  • Starting a new Language Reference
  • Parse-time evaluation
  • Integration of more uutils commands
  • Dataframes: allow specifying schema (#11634)
  • New CLI flag: --no-history (#11550)
  • Strict JSON parsing (#11592)
  • Our set of commands is evolving [toc]
    • New commands [toc]
    • Changes to existing commands [toc]
    • Deprecated commands [toc]
    • Removed commands [toc]
• Breaking changes [toc]
• Full changelog [toc]

Themes of this release / New features [toc]

New Reedline coolness

We have some exciting new improvements in our line editor, thanks to unprecedented number of contributions since the last release.

First, the matching prefix of a completion is now highlighted (note that this doesn't work with fuzzy completions yet):

Second, completion menus now have more of an IDE feel to them (activated by Ctrl+N) #11593

Third, shift navigation (#11535) now allows selecting and pasting text by holding the Shift key:

All the new changes are configurable: See the changes to the default config file (if the link does not bring you to the default_config.nu file, click the "Files changed" tab, then search for "default_config.nu" and open the diff) to see what has changed.

(Breaking Change!) Handling globs

From this release, we unified glob rules for the following commands: open, rm, cp, umv, mv, du, ls (#11621).

The general rules is: If given parameter is quoted by single quote(') or double quote("), don't auto-expand the glob pattern (#11569). If not quoted (or using backtick quote`), the glob pattern is auto-expanded.

So if you have the following files: aac.txt, abc.txt, a[ab]c.txt, then:

• ls a[ab]c.txt matches aac.txt, abc.txt
• rm "a[bc]c.txt" removes a file named a[bc]c.txt
• ls C:\Program Files\a[ab]c.txt matches aac.txt, abc.txt

But if you save a file name in a variable, e.g: let f = "a[ab]c.txt", then ls $f matches aac.txt, abc.txt. To escape the glob pattern to match a file named a[bc]c.txt, str escape-glob comes to play: ls ($f | str escape-glob).

The new str escape-glob command (#11663) is useful when you want to prevent globs from expanding, for example when using a closure: ls | str escape-glob name | each {|row| ls $row.name }, so you won't get error occasionally.

(Breaking Change!) For existing plugin

Nushell allows plugins to receive configuration from the nushell configuration #10955, the communication protocol between nushell and plugin have changed to achieve the behavior. So plugins need to update nu-plugin dependency version and recompile it to make plugin works again.

Starting a new Language Reference

Recently, we started a new reference page for Nushell language and its features. For years, we have used the current book as both a reference point for Nushell's features and a tutorial. The result is that it is too verbose to be used as a quick reference page, and due to its exhaustiveness it is also hard to keep concise as a tutorial. The story-like writing style makes it also harder to keep up to date. Over time, we hope to offload content from the book to the reference page that should be less verbose and easier to update. At the same time, we aim to refactor the book into more of a tutorial style and make it more coherent. Practical recipes for solving common problems continue being collected in the cookbook.

Parse-time evaluation

String interpolation can be now performed at parse time #11562. This gives you another way to, for example, compose files for importing or sourcing, for example:

const name = "spam"
use ($nu.default-config-dir | path join $"($name).nu")

The ansi commands now can also be evaluated at parse time: #11682

Integration of more uutils commands

Continuing our cooperation with uutils, we now have a new umv command, implemented by uutils, which will replace our current mv #10822.

Our old-cp was also removed #11622 and now we rely solely on cp from uutils

Dataframes: allow specifying schema (#11634)

The dfr into-df command can now accept a schema. A new dfr schema command can be used to view the schema:

> {a:1, b:{a:2}} | dfr into-df -s {a: u8, b: {a: i32}} | dfr schema
╭───┬─────────────╮
│ a │ u8          │
│   │ ╭───┬─────╮ │
│ b │ │ a │ i32 │ │
│   │ ╰───┴─────╯ │
╰───┴─────────────╯

New CLI flag: --no-history (#11550)

If nushell is launched with the --no-history CLI flag, then command history file will not be read from or written to. You can check whether history is enabled using $nu.history-enabled. It will be false if --no-history was provided and true otherwise.

Strict JSON parsing (#11592)

The from json command now has a --strict flag which will error on invalid JSON. For example, comments and trailing commas are not allowed in JSON, and so will trigger an error with the --strict flag.

Our set of commands is evolving [toc]

As usual, new release rhyms with changes to commands!

New commands [toc]

Apart from commands already mentioned above, into cell-path can now be used to create cell paths dynamically.

Breaking changes [toc]

• #11705 query web --query should return list<list<string>> like the scraper crate's ElementRef::text()
• #11672 Fix precedence of 'not' operator
• #11331 hide std testing
• #11541 Remove --flag: bool support
• #11581 Plugin explicit flags
• #11030 Fix parsing of strings with special characters
• #10955 Allow plugins to receive configuration from the nushell configuration

Full changelog [toc]