Review: nushell v0.21.0

This note captures my review on Nushell v0.21.0 released on 2020-10-13.

Nushell is a shell aiming to provide higher abstractions to work with strctured data. In their words:

The goal of this project is to take the Unix philosophy of shells, where pipes connect simple commands together, and bring it to the modern style of development.

# Summary

Nushell v0.21.0 is not ready to fully replace my current shell, zsh, but it shows great potential already so it is worth checking its evolution closely.

# Learning curve

The learning curve is soft and steady. The book does a great job at introducing concepts bit by bit and the cookbook is a good complement for ready to go recipes. In both cases though I found the examples slightly out of sync, consequence of the rapid evolution of Nu.

# Highlights

The shell is a pleasure to use, feels intuitive and composing pipelines over structured data makes it very attractive for data transformations. The fact that it can open most of the common formats (e.g. CSV, JSON, XML, TOML) making the converge into the same model is a game changer for me.

# Limitations

This is the list of issues that make me think the Nushell is not ready for my day to day shell:

# Background/foreground jobs

I rely quite heavily on CTRL+z to send Vim to the background and fg to bring it back. Unfortunately Nushell does not implement this or any equivalent that I could find.

# Scripting

I don't write shellscripts very often but Nushell offering makes it more compelling for data wrangling. It's an enhancement being worked out at the moment so not a big deal.

I couldn't find a way to interpolate environment variables in strings for example in echo. This is particularly noticeable in setting variables from other variables and when setting aliases.