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# What is Nushell?

Nushell is an interactive programming language for working with your files, your system, and your data as a shell, a notebook, and more.

## Nu is more than a shell

It's easy to think of Nushell as just a shell. It's even got 'shell' in the name. It's the first and probably main way you'll interact with it. So why say it's "more than a shell"?

In truth, Nushell is actually two things at once: Nu and Nushell. Nu is an interactive language for processing streams of structured data, data that you're probably getting from files, your system, a web address, etc.

So what's Nushell?

Nushell is taking the Nu language and putting it into a shell, and building around it a set of shell features to make it feel comfortable to use as a login shell. Completions, pretty error messages, and the like.

When we say that "Nu is more than a shell", does that imply that Nu can be used in other places, too? Absolutely. We've got two more hosts that let you run Nu, a [jupyter-based](https://github.com/nushell/nu_jupyter) host that lets you run Nu in jupyter notebooks, and a [WebAssembly-based](https://github.com/nushell/demo) host that we use to create the [Nu playground](https://www.nushell.sh/demo/)

The idea of Nu runs deeper than just the shell, to being a language that's relatively easy to learn, yet powerful enough to do real work with your system, to process large amounts of data, to interactively let you iterate quickly on an idea, to invite exploration by building up a pipeline one piece at a time. There's really no shortage of ambition for where we hope to go.

# The design of Nu

Nu's original design has proven surprisingly robust thus far. Some of its core ideas are continuing to pay dividends a year later. Let's look at the designs that still feel right.

## Pipelines are infinite

When we first started writing Nu, we took a few shortcuts that had us processing all the data in a pipeline at once. Very quickly, we realize this wasn't going to work. External commands (think `cat /dev/random`) can output an infinite stream of data, and the system needs to be able to handle it. Understanding this, we transitioned to a different model: data flows between command as infinite streams of structured data. As the data is processed, we avoid collecting the data whenever possible to allow this streaming to happen.