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 https://api.github.com/repos/elves/elvish/issues |
     from-json | all (one) |
     each {|x| echo (exact-num $x[number]): $x[title] } |
     head -n 7
1465: Pipelines.html still using legacy syntax.
1464: Ability to change the initial filter for completion
1463: No filtering when constructing the candidate list du
ring completion
1462: Add language.html and command.html to docset search
index
1460: Symbols Clobbered by Elvish?
1453: Add a `&uniq` option to the `builtin:order` command
and a `builtin:uniq` command
1449: Hard crash with an Alias module alias with closure

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'
   } except e {
     echo error $e
   } else {
     echo ok
   }
error ?(fail 'bad error')

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. 

~>                                           xiaq@xiaqsmbp
 LOCATION  
  * ~                                                     
  * ~/go/src/github.com/elves/elvish                     │
110 ~/on/elvish-site/code                                │
 62 ~/on/elvish-site/code/src                            │
 52 ~/go/src/github.com/elves/elvish/edit                │
 34 ~/on/elvish-site/code/tty                            │
 33 ~/on/elvish-site/code/assets                         │
 32 ~/go/src/github.com/elves/elvish/eval                │
 26 ~/on/chat-app/code                                   │
 24 ~/on/elvish-site/code/dst                            │
 20 ~/go/src/github.com/elves/md-highlighter             │
 14 ~/on/chat-app/code/public                            │
 13 ~/.elvish                                            │

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. 

~>                                           xiaq@xiaqsmbp
 HISTORY  
13345 make tools/ttyshot                                 │
13346 make                                               │
13347 ./assets/                                          │
13348 ls                                                 │
13349 ls                                                 │
13350 rm *.png                                           │
13351 git st                                             │
13352 ..                                                 │
13353 git st                                             │
13354 git add .                                          │
13355 git st                                             │
13356 git commit                                         │
13357 git push                                           │

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. 

~/go/src/github.com/elves/elvish>            xiaq@xiaqsmbp
 NAVIGATING  
 elvish           CONTRIBUTING.md    FROM golang:onbuild 
 fix-for-0.7      Dockerfile                             
 images           Gopkg.lock       
 md-highlighter   Gopkg.toml       
                  LICENSE          
                  Makefile         
                  README.md        
                  cover           │
                  daemon          │
                  edit            │
                  errors          │
                  eval            │
                  getopt          │

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