---
title: Nushell 0.26
author: The Nu Authors
author_site: https://twitter.com/nu_shell
author_image: https://www.nushell.sh/blog/images/nu_logo.png
excerpt: Today, we're releasing 0.26 of Nu. It's a polish release with lots of improvements.
---

# Nushell 0.26

Nushell, or Nu for short, is a new shell that takes a modern, structured approach to your commandline. It works seamlessly with the data from your filesystem, operating system, and a growing number of file formats to make it easy to build powerful commandline pipelines.

Today, we're releasing 0.26 of Nu. It's a polish release with lots of improvements.

<!-- more -->

# Where to get it

Nu 0.26 is available as [pre-built binaries](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/releases/tag/0.26.0) or from [crates.io](https://crates.io/crates/nu). If you have Rust installed you can install it using `cargo install nu`.

If you want all the goodies, you can install `cargo install nu --features=extra`.

As part of this release, we also publish a set of plugins you can install and use with Nu. To install, use `cargo install nu_plugin_<plugin name>`.

# What's New

## Rest support in custom commands (LhKipp, sophiajt)

You can now refer to a rest argument in your custom command:

```
def my-cmd[...rest:int] {
    echo $rest | math sum
}
```

Elements of the rest are referred to with positions, like `$rest.1` for the 2nd position.

## Short flags in custom commands (LhKipp)

You can now also added an optional shorthand flag to longhand flags:

```
def foo [--bar(-b): int] {
    echo $bar
}

foo -b 10
foo --bar 10
```

## Improved build times (sophiajt, stormasm)

When building from scratch, you may now notice that Nushell builds slightly faster. This comes from refactoring large crates into smaller crates and replacing some of our support crates with similar crates that compile faster.

## Improvements

I hope you like improvements. We got a _lot_ of them this release.

- fdcnred added support for using [multi-byte chars as padding](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2973), improved [ansi and char support](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2955), improved the output of [`sys`](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2959), optimized some [regex usage](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2937), removed [`set` from Windows built-ins](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2924), added support for [comparing a string and a filepath](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2906)
- JosephTLyons removed [unnecessary clones](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2970) and [fixed some test macros](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2969)
- andrasio added [column path support to many `str` commands](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2965)
- sophiajt added [error checking for bad rows in column paths](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2964), added [proper flushing of stdout](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2952), split [nu-cli and nu-engine](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2898), treat [the startup commands a single script](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2890) which improves startup times, fixed [reading/writing of bigint/bigdecimal](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/2893)