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 [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          │

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