Aliases
Aliases in Nushell offer a way of doing a simple replacement of command calls (both external and internal commands). This allows you to create a shorthand name for a longer command, including its default arguments.
For example, let's create an alias called ll
which will expand to ls -l
.
> alias ll = ls -l
We can now call this alias:
> ll
Once we do, it's as if we typed ls -l
. This also allows us to pass in flags or positional parameters. For example, we can now also write:
> ll -a
And get the equivalent to having typed ls -l -a
.
List all loaded aliases
Your useable aliases can be seen in scope aliases
and help aliases
.
Persisting
To make your aliases persistent they must be added to your config.nu file by running config nu
to open an editor and inserting them, and then restarting nushell. e.g. with the above ll
alias, you can add alias ll = ls -l
anywhere in config.nu
$env.config = {
# main configuration
}
alias ll = ls -l
# some other config and script loading
Piping in aliases
Note that alias uuidgen = uuidgen | tr A-F a-f
(to make uuidgen on mac behave like linux) won't work. The solution is to define a command without parameters that calls the system program uuidgen
via ^
.
def uuidgen [] { ^uuidgen | tr A-F a-f }
See more in the custom commands section of this book.
Or a more idiomatic example with nushell internal commands
def lsg [] { ls | sort-by type name -i | grid -c | str trim }
displaying all listed files and folders in a grid.