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Nushell setup

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    Name
    Jordan Stewart
    Twitter

I decided to try out nushell. The reason for this is I dislike bash/zsh if statements, and other similarities.

For reference here is a bash if statement:

file="file.txt"
#Checking if a file exists
if [[ -e "$file" ]]; then
  echo "$file file exists."
fi

Whenever I am writing a bash script, I have to pause and look up this syntax. It's just like the tar command.

Here is the same thing in nushell:

let file = "file.txt"
if $file | path exists {
  $"($file) file exists"
}

I think I can learn to write that whilst not breaking my flow.

For reference, I tried out Elvish shell as well, and I found the missing history command to be a deal breaker for me. You can use Ctrl-R in Elvish for history (I think), but I have to look that up every time as well.

I found installing nushell easy, with nix package manager on MacOs, but I had two problems:

  1. adding custom commands in a modular way
  2. setting up PATH You can see how I solved these problems below.

You can find the config directory of nushell with this command:

$nu.default-config-dir

The config.nu file is quiet long:

❯ wc -l config.nu
     743 config.nu

So I didn't want to edit that file, and I wanted to keep my custom commands separate. I created a custom.nu file in that directory, and added the following command in env.nu to load the custom file on startup:

source ($nu.default-config-dir | path join 'custom.nu')

I think a nice way to add to PATH is:

use std "path add"
$env.PATH = ($env.PATH | split row (char esep))
path add /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin
path add ($env.HOME | path join "Library" "pnpm")
path add ($env.HOME | path join ".nix-profile" "bin")
path add ($env.HOME | path join ".bun" "bin")
path add ($env.HOME | path join ".npm-global" "bin")
path add ($env.CARGO_HOME | path join "bin")
path add /usr/local/go/bin
path add ($env.HOME | path join ".local" "bin")
$env.PATH = ($env.PATH | uniq)

I think this is another nice way to adding to path:

$env.PATH = ($env.PATH |
    split row (char esep) |
    append /usr/local/bin |
    append ($env.CARGO_HOME | path join "bin") |
    append ($env.HOME | path join ".local" "bin")
)
# filter so the paths are unique
$env.PATH = ($env.PATH | uniq)

I also added some custom commands to custom.nu, like:

def search [query: string] {
  let search = "https://google.com.au/search?q=" + $query
  ^open -a '/Applications/Firefox Developer Edition.app' $search
}

And that's my current nushell setup. It is also nice to have these configuration files versioned in git. I like stow to symlink and version this.