A tour around nushell - a modern replacement for zsh and bash based on structured data
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- Опубликовано: 27 июл 2024
- Did you ever notice how little has changed in how we interact with a terminal? Sure, zsh is nicer than sh, tmux is useful - but working in a terminal is still extremely based on text, strange mnemonics etc. ChatGPT helps with all that, but wouldn't it be nice if we could have a shell that is built around modern ideas, not only the same stuff as in the 70ies?
This is what nushell is (nushell.sh) - it is written in rust, taking some inspiration from powershell but packaging it all in a really ergonomic package.
Commands consume and output structured data (through wrappers around the most common linux command or parsing/serialization helpers for the rest). This then lets you learn how to sort or filter data once and use it for all sorts of programs.
In this video I give a brief tour of nushell, how it works and some ideas for you can do with it.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:58 What would we like in a shell?
2:10 Starting nushell and a first taste - ls
4:25 Outputting to different structured formats
5:44 Inspecting structured data - sys
7:40 Building more complex pipes with each
11:00 Working with sqlite databases
13:50 Http requests from nushell
14:50 Parsing text into structured form
15:40 The built in help
16:10 Query web to query into html
16:36 Working with common programs that output only text like git
21:12 Getting structured output from docker
23:50 Installing nushell
25:10 Dataframe support for parquet files 
Наука
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Demonstrating a shell through VS Code was triggering 😅
😂 - I recorded this video for my co-workers and the fact that Vs code has a decent terminal and is cross platform is useful for us :)
Really it was…. 😂
Interesting
Disgusting
This looks really nice! It's interesting that a lot of this has been in powershell for a really long time.
But wait, it also actually takes OUT options you already know. No "ls -ltr" for you anymore! "ls | sort-by modified" and no completion on that "modified" either. Definitely curious enough to play for a few days though.
@@howardjones543 Yes, but on the other hand you learn once how to sort-by and can then sort all output of any command without finding out how that specific command does it.
OMG, This is awesome, I love how the columns are repeated on both sides of the table. This feels like what bash or zsh would look like if they were written in our modern era. Thanks Daniel
Hey Ody! Really nice to see that you like it too :). Let's catch up some time!
@@DanielBachlerYeah absolutely
Wow 7 months and I didn't know about that awesome vscode terminal feature, thanks, and thanks for the tip and for the video overall!
This was way more interesting than i thought it would be
Power shell does things very similarly, structured data objects with filtering and conversions and formatted output and some 4000 cross platform built in modules and everyone seems to hate it. This looks nice though. Really like that you can tell it how to parse things it doesn’t natively understand
Yeah - Powershell had great ideas but the verbosity etc was not ideal. I think nushell really hits a sweet spot here.
A lot of the inspiration for nushell comes from powershell. The dev that created nushell used to work at Microsoft for a couple of decades
@@DanielBachler The verbosity is only recommended in scripts, so you can understand them next year when you need to update something. On the cli there are aliases, auto-complete, Ctrl-Space, and switches/parameters only need disambiguation (eg, no need to write '-Parameters', most of the time -Par is enough to disambiguate from -Path)
Great demo ! Very powerful shell, esp for people who like to manipulate data quickly at the shell
Nushell saved me 10 minutes of formatting an ugly JSON file by hand by instead composing a chain of commands to do what I want. It took me a few hours, I was just starting using it, but being able to work with files in this way was so satisfying and definitely much nicer than Python!
or just learn to use jq.
Thanks for this! Just installed nushell on a recommendation and was wondering what I could do with it… looks like things have changed over the past couple of years so was glad to find your walkthrough. I’m excited!
Really cool work!
`take 1 | transpose` == `first`
Good catch :) - when I recorded this video I wasn't so aware yet of all the useful functions. Thanks for signposting it so others can find it!
You made me try rhis out... Thanks!!
nutshell sounds like if a Linux shell and PowerShell had a baby
Pretty much 🙂
Its like a good Powershell
Looks interesting. Hope it gets popular so I can use it.
Why would it have to be popular for you to use it?
Been using nutshell for the past 5-6 months. I don’t think I’ll be going back.
Great video!... What plugins are you using (Especially the one that lets you display details of the git repository)?
IIRC the only plugin I used was the query plugin (github.com/nushell/nushell/tree/main/crates/nu_plugin_query). The git stuff wasn't using any plugin but instead used the jc standalone utility (github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc). Hope that helps!
The wishes are sundunopulated
the ls reminded me of a pandas dataframe
Yeah that is exactly right - it actually uses a dataframe library internally :)
what problem would this be fixing ? i can't stop shivering at all those borders messing up every grep and xclip
Well the whole point is that you don't work on the textual level most of the time, so the borders you see are just generated when printing the results to the screen. Imagine you have a csv with a bunch of numeric columns and you want to select the rows that have a value between 0.4 and 0.6 in column A. This is really easy in Nushell because you open the csv file and then you just filter by parsed values. It can be done with traditional shell tools but it's quite more cumbersome in many cases.
If all you ever need to do is to grep for precise text then yes, Nushell doesn't make that particular use case much easier; but it combines a lot better between different, hetherogeneous operaions.
@@DanielBachler that’s doable in any shell awk first one that comes to mind
@@garciajero You can do command | to tsv to make the output tsv without borders. It doesn't fix a problem, in my opinion, but it makes dealing with data easier by default, while you'd need additional | to tsv if you want the output useful for computers instead of human eyes.
@@only2sea Im not really complaining about the borders much , i think it fixes a problem that nobody has this shell thing
@@garciajero Awk has a high learning curve, with it being similar to a programming language on its own. Any shell that removes the need for such learning is worth looking into, in my opinion.
It's almost like separating shell languages from "proper" programming languages was a huge mistake.
It's hard to make something that both works in a terse UI situation like a terminal but also at large scale. Are you thinking of a something specific? The closest that comes to mind for a good shell and a nice programming language would be Clojure with Babushka as a shell (github.com/babashka/babashka) - but I never got sufficiently comfortable with lisp syntax to enjoy that stack, even though I'm sure it's cool
Well, it’s not that someone decided to separate them. The requirement to handle text IO and to access the system just creates a set of features that makes them different to other more general programming languages.
considering many shells were written when a tty was ACTUALLY a 300 bps paper teletype, having the shell be as terse as possible made sense!
Is it possible that you share you nushell config file?
Sure! My nushell config is in an open git repo at github.com/danyx23/nu. It's a pretty messy workbench and not optimized for re-use but maybe still useful
It's nice, and fun to try things with. I was hoping for a cool demo though, like the joining between different data types you mentioned.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to use it. I have a blast playing with it but no.
Eventually I have to set boundaries with what a shell is and isn't.
Sure, to each their own :). I think it's also very valid to just come back once it reaches 1.0, at the moment there are definitely still a few things changing every month which not everyone might want to keep up wit
@@DanielBachler I mean, I don't mind the syntax changes. Okay I don't remember them either. Fundamentally, NuShell looks like it would go well with a text editor and a live repl, but for a command line interface... I'm not sold.
Still not gonna replace my beloved Bash shell.
Why do you have a separate pyproject.toml and poetry.toml file? The poetry configuration can be inside the pyproject.toml file.
I searched around for about 10 minutes on how to install this on Linux Mint, but gave up in the end.
I don't know much about Linux Mint, but shouldn't it work to just download the binary from the release page? github.com/nushell/nushell/releases/tag/0.91.0
@@DanielBachlerYou see, I have an issue where I tend to overcomplicate things. Just downloading the binary worked of course... 😅
The pros of a terminal with the cons of vscode
Feels too much like Powershell
I always felt that Powershell is clunky but it had some great ideas. To me, Nushell takes the best of Powershell and makes it nicely useable - but to each their own :)
What vscode theme is this?
Dark modern
hmmm
ouchh
Those borders just drive me nuts
yuggly
seems too verbose
but piping functionally is cool
Thanks for the demo intro!
If you dislike the default border style then try the other options :) www.nushell.sh/book/coloring_and_theming.html#table-borders
Amm amm amm
Soooo… powershell? No?
as a Windows admin by day my take is: absolutely this is powershell for linux :D
@@marcgranlund6156 well more so powershell for people who dislike MS still, since theirs already powershell for Linux :S
It definitely takes a lot of inspiration from Powershell! I worked with powershell before and I like the ergonomics of Nushell quite a lot more in the end. If you like powershell and work a lot in the terminal then definitely give Nushell a try
I've always used terminals super minimally and hesitantly, it's cool to know that both powershell and nushell can process tables like this, make me curious about both
It might be great, but unit it is not available in default repo on rhel and debian, I don't want even try it.
wow thanks a lot for this very enjoyable video
Oh thanks for all the pointers! This is super helpful!
@@DanielBachler happy to share ;)