new-blog: Nushell, after 8 months

Author: okmanideep

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posts/2024-04-29-nushell-after-8-months.md

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+---
+cover: false
+title: 'Nushell, after 8 months'
+description: "I have been using nushell as my primary shell for the last 8 months and I don't see myself going back to bash or zsh or powershell"
+date: 2024-04-29 11:15:00
+tags: ['shell', 'nushell', 'cli', 'unix', 'powershell']
+---
+
+> ... Plain text is definitely simpler than tables. So maybe we are just moving complexity here. Or this is a very good abstraction and a lot of things improve. Time will tell.
+
+[Me, 8 months ago](https://okmanideep.me/i-am-very-excited-about-using-nushell-everyday/)
+
+And the last 8 months have told me - Tables are a very good abstraction for CLI. No doubt. Possibly because they retain the fundamental nature of [Values](https://youtu.be/-6BsiVyC1kM?si=w1U3f4OzdOAT6C55). In fact, tables are already present in unix shell, hiding in plain text. `ps`, `ll`, `kubectl` and many more programs have a tabular output. And to do anything with them, it's a lot more easier in `nushell` than in `bash` or similar shells.
+
+## Surprisingly seamless 🧈
+I had my concerns initially - "Won't I face a lot of issues with all the unix programs, that just expect plain text and output plain text?". But it's barely been a problem. `nushell`'s inbuilt commands and operators just take care of converting plain text to structured data and extract the necessary values to pipe them back into other programs.
+
+Let's take an example. Get the first pod's name with the status `Running` in a kubernetes cluster and enter it's shell?
+
+```sh
+$ kubectl -n namespace get pods
+```
+gets you a table like this
+
+```
+NAME                                                 READY   STATUS      RESTARTS      AGE
+namespace-86c7df9555-4n9cc                             1/1     Running     0             2d2h
+namespace-86c7df9555-65nks                             1/1     Running     0             2d2h
+namespace-86c7df9555-cdzll                             1/1     Running     1 (35h ago)   2d1h
+namespace-86c7df9555-dlpnx                             1/1     Running     0             35h
+namespace-86c7df9555-fnrgd                             1/1     Running     0             2d2h
+namespace-86c7df9555-lnx2v                             1/1     Running     0             2d1h
+namespace-86c7df9555-nmwrx                             1/1     Running     0             2d2h
+namespace-86c7df9555-xv45m                             1/1     Running     0             35h
+```
+This is just plain text but pipe it into `detect columns` and we get an actual `nushell` table
+
+```sh
+$ kubectl -n namespace get pods | detect columns
+```
+
+<img src="https://imgur.com/9lVQPJ0.png" style="max-width: 600px;" />
+
+Now we can filter the rows with `where` and get the first row with `first`
+
+```sh
+$ kubectl -n namespace get pods | detect columns | where { $it.STATUS == "Running" } | first | get NAME
+```
+
+We can store this in a variable and access the shell with `kubectl exec`
+
+```sh
+$ let pod_id = kubectl -n namespace get pods | detect columns | where { $it.STATUS == "Running" } | first | get NAME
+$ kubectl -n namespace exec -it $pod_id -- /bin/bash
+```
+
+Or just put it in `()` brackets and use it directly
+
+```sh
+$ kubectl -n namespace exec -it (kubectl -n namespace get pods | detect columns | where { $it.STATUS == "Running" } | first | get NAME) -- /bin/bash
+```
+
+Working within `nushell` has been a lot like working with the programming languages that I am used to. It feels like I am in a REPL of one of those languages. Familiar and comfortable.
+
+## Perfect for data wrangling ⚙️
+Lately I have been working with some csv files and what a delight it has been to work with them in `nushell`.
+
+Colleague pings me saying "Here are the leads we want to add to the database - leads.csv".
+
+I take a look at the file and there are some invalid user_ids in the file.
+
+```sh
+open leads.csv | where { ($it.user_id | describe) != 'int' } | count
+```
+I inform him - "Hey, we have 32 invalid user_ids in the leads.csv file. I will ignore them for now." and move on.
+
+```sh
+open leads.csv | where { ($it.user_id | describe) == 'int' } | get user_id | str join ',' | pbcopy
+```
+(Copies the user_ids to the clipboard)
+
+I can probably do the same with `awk` and `sed` in `bash`. But this is a lot more simpler for me. Possibly because I work with object oriented languages a lot. And commands like `where`, `first`, `take`, `skip` are very familiar to me because all the languages have adopted these functional paradigms for operating with collections / streams.
+
+By the way, if I want to convert that CSV to JSON?
+
+```sh
+open leads.csv | to json | pbcopy
+```
+Ready to just paste it into a node REPL.
+
+This works with CSV, JSON, YAML, TOML, SQLite and [many more formats](http://www.nushell.sh/book/loading_data.html#opening-files). This came in handy to check which exact version of package is being used in a `package-lock.json` file a number of times.
+
+```sh
+open package-lock.json | get dependencies | get ws | get version
+```
+
+## It can't all be that good, can it?
+While I was about to adopt a new shell that's not 1.0 yet, I was expecting to deal with some rough edges.
+
+> It feels like a pre-honeymoon phase with nu. So there is a lot of adulation right now. It's likely that there are a lot of sour learnings to follow
+
+[Me, 8 months ago](https://okmanideep.me/i-am-very-excited-about-using-nushell-everyday/)
+
+To be honest, I didn't have to deal with many issues. But there was one which took a bit of time to figure out.
+
+[fnm](https://github.com/Schniz/fnm) - fast node version manager, only offer setup instructions for `bash`, `zsh`, `fish` and `powershell` to add necessary changes to the shell profile for the right $PATH. For `nushell`, we have to use something like this
+
+```sh
+# fnm - node version manager
+# https://dev.to/vaibhavdn/using-fnm-with-nushell-3kh1
+load-env (/opt/homebrew/bin/fnm env --shell bash | lines | str replace 'export ' '' | str replace -a '"' '' | split column = | rename name value | where name != "FNM_ARCH" and name != "PATH" | reduce -f {} {|it, acc| $acc | upsert $it.name $it.value })
+
+$env.PATH = ($env.PATH | prepend $"($env.FNM_MULTISHELL_PATH)/bin")
+```
+
+Essentially fake the shell, get the necessary changes and apply them to the `nushell` environment.
+
+Some extra work to setup programs that output configuration for bash / zsh etc. And a few copy pasta for setting up some completions.
+
+That's about it. After I have setup `nushell` in my system and added it to my [dotfiles](https://github.com/okmanideep/dotfiles), it's been a smooth ride across both Windows and MacOS. I have been using `nushell` as my primary shell for the last 8 months and I don't see myself going back to `bash` or `zsh` or `powershell`.