Elvish is a friendly interactive shell and an expressive programming language. It runs on Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows.

Demos

Enable JavaScript to see demos as slides.

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 [issue]{ echo $issue[number]: $issue[title] } |
     head -n 11
366: Support searching file from elvish directly
364: Ctrl-C in elvish kills Atom in background
357: Asynchronous syntax highlighting
356: In web backend, run commands with pty IO, not pipe
354: Support multi-line prompts from byte output
353: Completers should detect context in a top-down manner
352: Quoted command names are highlighted randomly
351: keep navigation mode open after command
350: Raw mode requires two presses of ^V
344: Elvish won't compile
343: Possible to suppress job control messages?

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          │

Run Elvish

Use this Site

Start your Elvish journey in this very website!

  • Learn the fundamentals and interesting topics

  • Peruse the definitive reference documents

  • Read the blog for news, tips, and developers’ musings

  • Subscribe to the feed to keep updated

Join the Community

Join any of the following channels – they are all all bridged together thanks to matterbridge!

More Resources