Nushell core team meeting 2023-08-09

Attendees

• Darren
• JT
• Stefan
• Michael
• Antoine

Agenda

• Plan for $nothing removal, Bikeshedding a type name
• Fixing the argument parsing of def main invocations
• Quoting arguments 9933 maybe this is the same as above?
• Darren's raw string support
• 2023 survey progress Proposed questions for the user survey
• How are we going to fix the reedline resize bug?
• What to do with the explore?
• Working with previous output?
• What to do with debug and inspect?

Discussed Topics

$nothing and type name

• Just have null as the literal (reputation is yucky, but brevity/)
• Everybody onboard with removing $nothing, but all the major integrations need to be checked (remember let-env)
• what do we call the TYPE
  • currently nothing
  • null to be 1:1 with the type
  • none/empty/void as alternatives
  • Reasonable uses would be only for input/output annotation
• https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/9918 does both
• Let's get $nothing removal cleared first (breaking change verification)
• would this be a good place to figure out deprecation logic so we first deprecate with warning and then remove in a separate release.
  • interest

def main arguments get parsed weird?

• How do we want to deal with it if invoked from POSIX shell? foo "3"
• Can we restrict the allowed ARGUMENTS to 'string'
  • would make parsing much more predictably posix
  • but provides a convenient way to validate inputs
• But also modules have the option for def main
• script/module differences! (also affects input/output streams)
• JT is looking into it
• Respond to issue filer of #9933

Raw strings

https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/9956

Still have so many options?

Observation after making the change, different colorings for different string types possible, if having explicit

Probably not taking this syntax

But we want to look into having different syntax highlighting for the different string kinds

Survey

JT has set up google forms based on other surveys, Stefan will help out moving new questions in.

Reedline resize issues

Related issues:

• When you start typing, the cursor jumps to the bottom
• When you type, it eats previous output lines?
  • we resolved the terminal specific ScrollUp/Down
  • possibly separate issue for menus
• Resizing and then we get odd output with lots of spaces
  • right prompt makes it immediately obvious. (bash/default zsh won't have that)
  • other shells
  • do we want right prompt: Darren yes, Storm no
  • Painful for the tiling VM/tmux folks
• Possibly related: outputting the prompt with each keypress?

NEEDS TO BE FIXED FOR 1.0!!!

explore

JT's experience with the modal behavior: not 1.0 ready with its clunky navigation?
cool factor of the TUI

Making it extra/feature gated?

needs work, still attract additional contributors

Working with the output of the previous command

often requested

e.g. http get

caching the big blob

• limit on infinite streams.
• redirecting is not possible for external commands without affecting the tty-ness of stdout
• we can not use the env vars (windows will not like this)
• maybe tunable threshold for number of entries

Before display_output hook to just capture the structured data

Issues

Image Not Showing Possible Reasons

• The image file may be corrupted
• The server hosting the image is unavailable
• The image path is incorrect
• The image format is not supported

Learn More →

the issues which needs-core-team-attention

Image Not Showing Possible Reasons

• The image file may be corrupted
• The server hosting the image is unavailable
• The image path is incorrect
• The image format is not supported

Learn More →

Note
to list all the PRs currently opened in nushell/nushell:

gh pr list --json url,number,author,title
| from json
| each {|i|
    $"- [($i.number)]\(($i.url)\) ($i.title) \(@($i.author.login)\)"
}
| reverse
| to text