2020-07-05

Elvish 0.14.0 Release Notes

Version 0.14.0 has been released on 2020-07-05, 6 months after 0.13, bringing many new features and bugfixes.

As usual, prebuilt binaries are offered for most common platforms.

Breaking changes

  • The type field of the value written by src have been removed.

  • The all command no longer preserves byte inputs as is; instead it turns them into values, one each line. It also accepts an optional list argument, consistent with other value-taking commands.

  • Output captures now strip trailing carriage returns from each line, effectively making \r\n accepted as a line separator (#970).

  • Map-like values written by the dir-history and re:find functions can no longer be assoc’ed.

Deprecated features

Elvish now has a deprecation mechanism to give advance notice for breaking changes. Deprecated features trigger warnings, and will be removed in the next release.

The following deprecated features trigger a warning whenever the code is parsed or compiled, even if it is not executed:

  • The explode command is now deprecated. Use all instead.

  • The joins, replaces and splits commands are now deprecated. Use str:join, str:replace and str:split instead.

  • The ^ command is now deprecated. Use math:pow instead.

  • The -time command has been promoted to time. The -time command is now a deprecated alias for time.

  • Using \ for line continuation is now deprecated. Use ^ instead.

The following deprecated features trigger a warning when the code is evaluated:

  • The &display-suffix option of the edit:complex-candidate is now deprecated. Use the &display option instead.

The following deprecated features, unfortunately, do not trigger any warnings:

  • The path field of the value returned by src is now deprecated. Use the name field instead.

Notable new features

New features in the language:

  • Exceptions can now be introspected by accessing their fields (#208).

  • Two new wildcard modifiers, type:dir and type:regular are added, which restricts the wildcard pattern to only match directories or regular files, respectively.

  • The printing of floating-point numbers has been tweaked to feel much more natural (#811).

  • Scripts may now use relative use to import modules outside ~/.elvish/lib.

  • Dynamic strings may now be used as command as long as they contain slashes (#764).

  • Elvish now supports CRLF line endings in source files (#918).

  • Comments are now allowed anywhere newlines serve as separators, notably inside list and map literals (#924).

  • The ^ character can now be used for line continuation.

New features in the standard library:

  • A new order command for sorting values has been introduced #651.

  • A new platform: module has been introduced.

  • A new unix: module has been introduced.

  • A new math: module has been introduced.

  • The fail command now takes an argument of any type. In particular, if the argument is an exception, it rethrows the exception (#941).

  • A new show command has been added, which is currently useful for printing the stack trace of an exception to the terminal.

  • A new make-map command creates a map from a sequence of pairs (#943).

  • A new read-line command can be used to read a single line from the byte input (#975).

  • The -time command has been promoted to time, and it now accepts an &on-end callback to specify how to save the duration of the execution (#295).

  • A new one command has been added.

  • A new read-upto command can now be added to read byte inputs up to a delimiter (#831).

New features in the interactive editor:

  • When a callback of the interactive editor throws an exception, the exception is now saved in a $edit:exceptions variable for closer examination (#945).

  • A new alternative abbreviation mechanism, “small word abbreviation”, is now available and configurable via $edit:small-word-abbr.

  • The ratios of the column widths in navigation mode can now be configured with $edit:navigation:width-ratio (#464)

  • A new $edit:add-cmd-filters variable is now available for controlling whether a command is added to the history.

    The default value of this variable filters out commands that start with a space.

  • The edit:complex-candidate now supports a &display option to specify the full display text.

Other improvements:

  • Elvish now uses $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to keep runtime files if possible.

  • Elvish now increments the $SHLVL environment variable (#834).

Notable bugfixes

  • Invalid option names or values passed to builtin functions now correctly trigger an exception, instead of being silently ignored (#958).

  • Elvish no longer crashes when redirecting to a high FD (#788).

  • Indexing access to nonexistent variables now correctly triggers a compilation error (#889).

  • The interactive REPL no longer highlights complex commands as red (#881).

  • Glob patterns after ~username now evaluate correctly (#793).

  • On Windows, tab completions for directories no longer add superfluous quotes backslashes (#897).

  • The edit:move-dot-left-small-word command has been fixed to actually move by a small word instead of a word.

  • A lot of race conditions have been fixed (#73, #754).