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June 13, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Adding Indexes To Lists

The Nushell command enumerate adds an index value to each item in a list. The index value is stored in an extra column named index. You can use this column to filter data based on the index value.

May 25, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Filtering Null And Empty Values

Nushell has very useful commands to filter lists and tables. When you have a list with null values, you can use the compact command to filter out the null values. With the option --empty you can also filter out empty items like empty strings, empty lists and empty records. If you want to filter out rows in a table where a column contains a null value, you can use the compact command followed by the name of the column.

May 21, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Rolling Dice

Nushell has some nice built-in commands to get randomized data. The random command can be used to get random numbers, strings, and more. You can use the dice subcommand to get random numbers between 1 and 6. The command returns a list of integers. With the option --dice you can specify how many times to throw the dice. By default the dice has 6 sides, but you can use the option --sides to change that. You could roll a dice with 2 sides, like flipping a coin, or roll a dice with 10 sides.

May 10, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Reload Environment

With the command config nu you can change the Nushell configuration. In order to enable any changes you made in the current shell session you must run source $nu.config-path. This will load the configuration in the current shell session. Another option is of course to stop the current shell session and start a new one.

Written with Nushell 0.104.0.

April 26, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Using Request Headers With HTTP Commands

The nice thing about the http command in Nushell is that you can interact with HTTP endpoints without the need to install any external tools. You can use several subcommands like get, post, put, delete and patch. Each of these commands has the options to specify request headers. You can use the option --headers or the short version -H followed by a list of header keys and values.

April 25, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Posting JSON to an HTTP Endpoint

The http command in Nushell can be used to interact with HTTP endpoints. You can post data to an endpoint using the post subcommand. If you want to post JSON data than you can simply use a record data structure and use the argument --content-type application/json (or the shorthand -t application/json). Nushell will automatically convert the record data structure to JSON and use it as the body of the HTTP request.

March 21, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Open File With Associated Application

To look at the contents of a file you can use the open command in Nushell. But if we want to open a file with an associated application you must use the start command. For example if you have an HTML file and use the open command you see the HTML source. When you use the start command it opens the HTML file in your default browser.

You can also use the start command to open a directory in the file manager of your operating system. If you use MacOS and type start . it will open the current directory in the Finder application.

When you use the start command followed by a URL it will open the URL in your default browser.

Written with Nushell 0.103.0.

March 18, 2025

SDKMAN! Listing And Upgrading Outdated SDKs And Tools

SDKMAN! is as powerful tool to install and manage software development kits (SDKs) and tools, like Java, Groovy, Gradle, Maven, Spring Boot and Quarkus. If you want to see if a new version of a SDK or tool is available, you can use the sdk upgrade command. This command will list all outdated SDKs and tools. The installed version and the latest version are shown for each SDK and tool. To see if a single SDK or tool is outdated, you can use the name of the SDK or tool as argument to the sdk upgrade command.

March 14, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Getting The HTTP Response Status

Nushell has a built-in command to invoke HTTP requests: http. You don’t need an external tool like curl or httpie to make HTTP requests. There a lot of options to use with the http command. One of them is the --full or shorter -f option to return a table with extra details of the HTTP request and response. The request and response headers, the body and status are returned in the table. You can easily get information from the table with all the default selection options for a table structure.

March 11, 2025

Nushell Niceties: Trimming Strings

Nushell has some powerful commands to work with strings. The str trim command can be used to trim whitespace from a string. By default whitespace from the beginning and end of a string is removed. To only remove whitespace from the beginning of the string you can use the --left argument (or the shorter option -l). For removing whitespace from the end of the string you can use the option --right or the shorter option -r. To trim a string based on another character you can use the option --char or the shorter option -c followed by the character to trim.