Home • Explore • Blog • CI
☰



nushell
1st chunk of `blog/2019-08-23-introducing-nushell.md`
193f46118f68275a96e6959313a8c98a3ff44c5b03cd46ee000000010000083b
---
title: Introducing nushell
author: Sophia Turner
author_site: https://twitter.com/sophiajturner
author_image: https://www.nushell.sh/blog/images/sophiajt.jpg
excerpt: Today, we're introducing a new shell, written in Rust. It draws inspiration from the classic Unix philosophy of pipelines, the structured data approach of PowerShell, functional programming, systems programming, and more.
---

# Introducing nushell

Today, we're introducing a new shell, written in Rust. It draws inspiration from the classic Unix philosophy of pipelines, the structured data approach of PowerShell, functional programming, systems programming, and more.

It's called Nushell, or just Nu for short. We have a [book](https://book.nushell.sh/en) (¡también se habla [Español](https://book.nushell.sh/es)!). We have a [repo](https://github.com/nushell/nushell).

This release was made by Sophia Turner (me), Yehuda Katz, and Andrés Robalino, with contributions from Odin Dutton.




# But why?

Many of us have gotten used to bash (or zsh/fish/etc), and don't understand why you would need another kind of shell. That was me, too, a few months ago before I started working on this. My friend Yehuda had discovered PowerShell and was going on and on about how amazing it was to do more with the shell, but until he actually gave me a demo, I didn't really believe him.

Then he talked me into joining him on an idea he had. What if we could take the ideas of a structured shell and make it more functional (as opposed to object-oriented)? What if, like PowerShell, it worked on Windows, Linux, and macOS? What if it had great error messages? I fell in love with the project ideas, made a few new friends, and many nights and weekends later I'd like to show you what we've made.

In this post, I'll talk about how a few simple ideas drive how Nu works, what Nu can do with them, and where we hope to go in the future.

# Simple ideas

To Nu, everything is data. When you type `ls`, you're given a table of information about the directory you're listing:
Title: Introducing Nushell
Summary
This document introduces Nushell (Nu), a new shell written in Rust, drawing inspiration from various sources like Unix pipelines and PowerShell's structured data approach. The release was made by Sophia Turner, Yehuda Katz, and Andrés Robalino, with contributions from Odin Dutton. It discusses the motivations behind creating Nu, its core ideas, and future goals. The primary aim is to create a functional, structured shell that works across Windows, Linux, and macOS, offering improved error messages.