Elvish is an expressive programming language and a versatile interactive shell, combined into one seamless package. It runs on Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows.

Demos

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Powerful Pipelines

Text pipelines are intuitive and powerful. However, if your data have inherently complex structures, processing them with the pipeline often requires a lot of ad-hoc, hard-to-maintain text processing code.

Pipelines in Elvish can carry structured data, not just text. You can stream lists, maps and even functions through the pipeline.

~> curl -sL api.github.com/repos/elves/elvish/issues |
all (from-json) |
each {|x| echo (exact-num $x[number]): $x[title] } |
head -n 10
1593: A mechanism to trap "interrupts" would be useful
1592: Should `make style` implicitly run the `codespell` t
arget?
1591: Add a &benchmark option to the time command
1590: Correct the documentation for the `try` command
1588: Support comparing booleans
1587: vi append command binding
1586: Add a `&benchmark` option to the `time` command
1585: boolean values are not comparable
1584: Documentation fixups
1583: Implement a `help` command

Intuitive Control Structures

If you know programming, you probably already know how if looks in C. So why learn another syntax?

Elvish comes with a standard set of control structures: conditional control with if, loops with for and while, and exception handling with try. All of them have a familiar C-like syntax.

~> if $true { echo good } else { echo bad }
good
~> for x [lorem ipsum] {
echo $x.pdf
}
lorem.pdf
ipsum.pdf
~> try {
fail 'bad error'
} catch e {
echo error $e
} else {
echo ok
}
error [&reason=[&content='bad error' &type=fail]]

Directory History

Do you type far too many cd commands? Do you struggle to remember which deeply/nested/directory your source codes, logs and configuration files are in?

Backed by a real database, Elvish remembers all the directories you have been to, all the time. Just press Ctrl-L and search, as you do in a browser.

~>                                                elf@host
LOCATION
10 ~/elvish
10 ~/.local/share/elvish
10 ~/elvish/website
10 ~/.config/elvish
9 ~/elvish/pkg/edit
9 ~/elvish/pkg/eval
9 /opt
9 /usr/local
9 /usr/local/share
9 /usr/local/bin
9 /usr
9 /tmp
8 ~/zsh

Command History

Want to find the magical ffmpeg command that you used to transcode a video file two months ago, but it is buried under a million other commands?

No more cycling through history one command at a time. Press Ctrl-R and start searching your entire command history.

~>                                                elf@host
HISTORY (dedup on)
3 echo "hello\nbye" > /tmp/x
4 from-lines < /tmp/x
5 cd /tmp
6 cd ~/elvish
7 git branch
8 git checkout .
9 git commit
19 git status
20 cd /usr/local/bin
21 echo $pwd
22 * (+ 3 4) (- 100 94)
31 make
32 math:min 3 1 30

Built-in File Manager

Want the convenience of a file manager, but can't give up the power of a shell?

You no longer have to choose. Press Ctrl-N to start exploring directories and preview files, with the full power of a shell still under your fingertips.

~/elvish>                                         elf@host
NAVIGATING
bash 1.0-release.md 1.0 has not been released yet.
elvish CONTRIBUTING.md
zsh Dockerfile
LICENSE
Makefile
PACKAGING.md
README.md
SECURITY.md
cmd
go.mod
go.sum
pkg
syntaxes

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