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?

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 make a choice. Press Ctrl-N to start exploring directories and preview files, with the full power of a shell still under your fingertip. 

~/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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