I am glad to see the evolving of modern shells. I enjoy using zsh, but now there are even fancier ones: nushell. It highlights three features:

  • cross-platform: works on Linux, MacOS, and Windows
  • everything is data: Nu pipelines use structured data so you can safely select, filter, and sort the same way every time. Stop parsing strings and start solving problems.
  • extensibility: it’s easy to extend Nu using a powerful plugin system.

More than a shell

From what I can tell by reading the documentation, scripting in nu is like programming in a compiled language. The developers of nu are ambitious: they want to incorporate some parts of data processing into a shell, but the question is, is it worth to rely on a shell language instead of a more powerful language for data analysis?

Anyway, it already feels like an exciting CLI tool to use. And it is written in Rust!

Prompt

Prompt is what you see when you type a command. It can show a lot of useful tips, saving your time and making user experience smooth and pleasant. starship is a shell prompt written also in Rust that works smoothly with nushell.