My Three(ish) Favorite Nushell Features

Been using the Nushell cross-platform user shell more and more over the last couple years. Might as well start learning it.

Today I use Nushell for one of my favorite learning tasks: examining my site. I made a throwaway one-liner when setting up Nushell on Windows. I want to try again, and think through the process a little more this time.

This post, and any that may follow on the topic, won’t be any kind of deep dive or contrast with other shells. Oh sure. I’ll point out things that surprise me. But I use maybe 20% of a shell’s features for 80% of my needs, and a Web search for the rest. Check the Nushell book’s Coming from Bash page if you want a more explicit comparison.

Let’s get started.

Nushell feature zero: showing program output

If you can’t easily run a program and see its output, you are in a REPL, not a shell. I have not come across a command shell that fails that test yet, but I use it as an immediate reassurance that I haven’t confused myself by launching ipython again.

I’m on Hugo again, which means I have the Hugo CLI. hugo list all prints out a CSV summary of your site, ready for processing by some other program.

hugo list all

Nushell feature zero point five: Piping output

Most shells let you pipe between processes, using the output of one as the input of the next. Nushell provides that functionality. No problem.

hugo list all | from csv

Of course, the result of that pipe is something a little different from other shells.

Nushell feature one: tables

There’s the table output that I find so appealing. Course, a pretty table is not so unusual these days. You can pipe from hugo to any number of CSV processing tools and pretty printers available to install on your machine.

But Nushell tables aren’t just pretty printing. They are core to working with the shell. The table you see is a visual representation of a table in memory, which can be further processed however you need.

Also? Nushell doesn’t need me to install an extra CSV processing tool. It can turn that output into something useful without any extra help thanks to an abundance of built-in commands.

Nushell feature two: the built-in commands and interactive help

Nushell includes many commands. You can see for yourself skimming through the Command Reference. Or see what’s available to you in your current version with help commands.

How many? Let’s ask the shell by piping help commands to the length command.

help commands | length

421

That’s a little overwhelming. Let’s see if we can narrow it down. That gives me a chance to show off some of the table processing I got so excited about.

Listing command categories by grouping

All these commands are organized into categories. To see what categories, we can group the help table.

help commands | group-by category

Listing only commands in a specific category with where

I read ahead, so I know that from csv is under the “formats” category. We use where to narrow the command list down so it only contains the format commands.

help commands | where category =~ formats

Viewing only select columns with select

That’s still a little busy. How about we select the name and usage? And heck — tables make for great screenshots, but let’s try see what to md gives us.

help commands | where category =~ formats | select name usage | to md

Awesome. All that and we’re still in the realm of Nushell builtin commands.

Note the pattern of commands and subcommands. The “formats” category includes two primary commands, from and to. Then many subcommands for converting from assorted formats to a table, and their counterparts for converting from a table to assorted formats.

Getting help for a specific command

We can ask for help with a specific command. Most shells offer this in one form or another, though they don’t generally provide the command discovery path we just walked down.

help to md

One more screenshot, because Nushell help is just so pretty.

Applying what we’ve got to the Hugo list

Let’s see if we can apply some of what we just used with our Hugo article list.

Remember Hugo? This was supposed to be a post about Hugo.

hugo list all | from csv | last 5 | select title publishDate | to md

That’s better. Sort of. I expected the last few posts to be a bit more recent. I need to do some intentional filtering and sorting. In order to do that, I need a real date instead of Hugo’s timestamp string. You can use a block for that.

Nushell feature three: blocks

The really basic idea is that blocks run arbitrary commands on a parameter, and let us do what we like with the result.

I’m going to do sort of a dataframe type of action here. That’s not a normal state for my brain so I need to step through this slowly.

hugo list all gave me some CSV text.

hugo list all

from csv turned that text into a table.

hugo list all | from csv

The publishDate column describes a date and time, but it contains text strings — not dates. To simplify filtering posts by date range, I want to add a column for the published date described by publishDate.

hugo list all | from csv | insert published-at ...

That published-at column contains the result of running a block of commands. I hand my current table to the block as a parameter.

hugo list all | from csv | insert published-at { |it| ... }

Nushell blocks look and work a bit like Ruby blocks. That means they also work similar to lambdas in Python and anonymous functions in other languages — cosmetic and shell-specific details aside.

The block returns a column with dates for every value in my table’s publishDate column.

(
  hugo list all |
  from csv |
  insert published-at { |it| $it.publishDate | into datetime }
)

Nushell uses the shell-like pattern of prefixing variable names with $ when we reference them.

Where were we? Oh right. I have a table with more columns than I care about.

I only want the post titles and the dates they were published.

(
  hugo list all |
  from csv |
  insert published-at { |it| $it.publishDate | into datetime } |
  select title published-at
)

And I’m writing a blog post, so let’s keep a readable number of rows in markdown format.

(
  hugo list all |
  from csv |
  insert published-at { |it| $it.publishDate | into datetime } |
  select title published-at |
  last 5 |
  to md
)

Okay I think that covers it.

Yeesh I have been writing this stuff down for a long time.

Nushell feature four: data types

My experience with data types in shells is limited and mostly unpleasant: values are strings that can be interchangeably treated as strings or numbers. Sometimes you can treat them like lists. Oops you broke something.

Nushell data type support goes past that. For starters, values declared in the shell itself have the appropriate type.

$ 1.2 | describe
float

$ "1.2" | describe
string

It also supports more complex structured types like records and of course tables. Nushell may not define as many types as Red — yet? — but it has far more than I’m accustomed to seeing from a shell.

What about conversions? In my fiddling so far, Nushell treats output from external programs like a string until you tell it otherwise, like a moment ago piping Hugo’s output from csv and then the publishDate column into datetime.

Date math

All right. Let’s figure this out. What datetime is it right now?

$ date now
Mon, 04 Jul 2022 18:08:26 -0700 (now)

Happy Fourth of July to those who celebrate by the way. Unless you celebrate by letting off fireworks in your or especially my neighborhood after midnight.

I arbitrarily picked three months as my threshold. Nushell provides numerous shorthands for durations, but so far nothing at an appropriate scale for ancient blogs. I haven’t found a lazy way to say “three months ago,” but I can say “90 days ago.” Close enough for today.

Need to make a subexpression out of date now so Nushell has a date it can use for the math.

$ (date now) - 90day
Tue, 05 Apr 2022 18:09:31 -0700 (3 months ago)

Since ((date now) - 90day) is a date and published-at is a date, I can do a direct comparison.

(
  hugo list all |
  from csv |
  insert published-at { |it| $it.publishDate | into datetime } |
  where published-at > ((date now) - 90day) |
  select title published-at |
  to md
)

Yeah I fibbed on the publish date for the post I’m writing. Figured it would be quicker than adding and explaining another filter for draft posts.

Wrapping up

True confession time: my three or so favorite features in Nushell are also the only features I’ve played with, and much of that was today. Just realized it’s been about a year since I started poking at Nushell as more than “that thing with cool ls output.”

It’s not my login $SHELL or anything yet — still need to figure out things like pyenv and nvm — but yeah I like using Nushell. Especially under Windows, where I know little enough about PowerShell that I can set up Nushell on Windows Terminal and pretend it’s a login shell.

Now I just need something that would make a cool cover image screenshot.

(
    hugo list all |
    from csv |
    insert year { |it| $it.publishDate | into datetime | date to-record | get year } |
    where year > 1 |
    histogram year --percentage-type relative |
    sort-by year
)