Version 0.16.0 has been released on 2021-08-21, 6 months after 0.15.0, bringing many new features and bugfixes.

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

Note: Versions 0.16.1, 0.16.2 and 0.16.3 were released to fix some packaging issues. They are otherwise identical to 0.16.0.

Breaking changes

Exceptions caused by a command trying to write to a closed pipe are now suppressed if the command is part of a pipeline and not the last command of the pipeline.
The builtin: namespace, useful for referring to builtin variables and commands explicitly, now requires use builtin before use, consistent with other standard library modules.
As a side effect of support for a integer numbers, contexts that require integers no longer accept floating point numbers with a zero fraction part (e.g. $li[1.0] is now illegal; $li[1] is required).
The following commands are now replaced by edit:close-mode: edit:close-listing, edit:completion:close, edit:history:close, edit:listing:close.
The edit:histlist:toggle-case-sensitivity command has been removed. Instead, the history listing mode now applies smart-case matching by default.
Declaring a variable with a ~ suffix, without an explicit initial value, now initializes its value to the builtin nop function rather than $nil (#1248).

Deprecated features

Deprecated features will be removed in 0.17.0.

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

The fopen and fclose commands are deprecated. Use file:open and file:close instead.
The prclose and pwclose commands are deprecated. Use file:close instead.

The following deprecated features unfortunately doesn’t trigger any warnings:

Iterating over certain list slices no longer crash Elvish (#1287).
Globbing no longer crashes when there are files whose names contain invalid UTF-8 sequences (#1220).
The path:is-dir and path:is-regular commands default behavior no longer follows a final symlink as advertised in the original documentation. A &follow-symlink option has been added to get the old, undocumented, behavior since it can be useful and avoids the need to use path:eval-symlinks to transform the path in common use cases.

New features in the language:

Elvish’s number type has been extended with support for arbitrary-precision integers and rationals. Many numerical commands in the builtin module and the math: module have been extended with support for them.
Experimental support for importing modules written in Go with use.

New features in the standard library:

A new file: module contains utilities for manipulating files.
Commands for creating temporary files and directories, path:temp-file and path:temp-dir (#1255).
New options to the edit:command-history command: &dedup, &newest-first, and &cmd-only (#1053).
New from-terminated and to-terminated commands to allow efficient streaming of byte sequences terminated by ASCII NUL or any other terminator (#1070).

New features in the interactive editor:

The editor now supports setting global bindings via $edit:global-binding. Global bindings are consulted for keys not present in mode-specific bindings.
A new edit:clear builtin to clear the screen has been added.
The editor now uses a DSL for filtering items in completion, history listing, location and navigation modes.
A new edit:after-command hook that is invoked after each interactive command line is run (#1029).
A new edit:command-duration variable that is the number of seconds to execute the most recent interactive command line (#1029).

New features in the command behavior:

Elvish now follows the XDG directory spec for placing the database and searching for rc.elv and libraries (#383). The legacy directory ~/.elvish is still respected for now, but may issue deprecation warnings in a future version. The exact paths are documented in the page for the Elvish command.