TL;DR — Quick Summary

Nushell is a modern shell where everything is structured data. Pipelines work with tables instead of text, built-in JSON/CSV/YAML support, and type-safe commands.

Nushell reimagines what a shell should be. Instead of piping text between commands that you parse with grep and awk, everything is structured data — tables, records, lists. It’s like having a database query language as your shell.

Installation

# macOS
brew install nushell

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S nushell

# Cargo
cargo install nu

# Start Nushell
nu

Structured Data Everywhere

# ls returns a table, not text
> ls
╭───┬────────────┬──────┬──────────┬───────────╮
│ # │    name    │ type │   size   │ modified  │
├───┼────────────┼──────┼──────────┼───────────┤
│ 0 │ README.md  │ file │    2.1KB │ yesterday │
│ 1 │ src        │ dir  │    4.0KB │ today     │
│ 2 │ Cargo.toml │ file │    512B  │ last week │
╰───┴────────────┴──────┴──────────┴───────────╯

# Filter, sort, select
> ls | where size > 1kb | sort-by size --reverse | select name size
> ps | where cpu > 5 | select name cpu mem

# Open and query data files
> open data.json | select name age | where age > 25
> open sales.csv | group-by region | get "North America"

Pipeline Operations

# SQL-like operations on any data
> ls | where type == "file" | sort-by modified | last 5
> ps | where name =~ "node" | select pid name cpu mem
> sys | get host
> http get https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell | get stargazers_count

# Math and aggregation
> ls | get size | math sum
> [1 2 3 4 5] | math avg

# String operations
> "Hello, World!" | str downcase | split chars | length

Data Format Support

# Built-in parsers for common formats
> open config.yaml
> open data.json
> open report.csv
> open settings.toml
> open data.xlsx

# Convert between formats
> open data.csv | to json
> open config.json | to yaml

# Parse from external commands
> curl -s https://api.example.com | from json | select name

Comparison

FeatureNushellBashZshFishPowerShell
Data typeStructuredTextTextTextObjects
PipelinesTablesTextTextTextObjects
Built-in dataJSON/CSV/YAMLNoNoNoXML/JSON
Type safetyYesNoNoNoPartial
CompletionsTypedBasicPluginsBuilt-inTyped
Cross-platformYesUnixUnixUnixYes
LanguageRustCCC++C#

Summary

  • Nushell outputs structured data (tables) instead of text — no more grep/awk/sed
  • SQL-like operations: where, select, sort-by, group-by, math
  • Built-in JSON, CSV, YAML, TOML, and Excel parsing
  • Cross-platform: Linux, macOS, Windows
  • Rich type system with helpful error messages