Elvish 0.19.1 has been released on 2023-03-05, almost a year after 0.18.0, bringing new features and bugfixes.

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

Note: The 0.19.0 version was tagged prematurely by mistake, but it has been picked up by some package managers. As a result, the 0.19.0 version is considered to be “skipped” officially. If your package manager provides a 0.19.0 version, it is probably identical to 0.19.1 in functionalities.

Note 2: The commit tagged 0.19.1 would advertise itself as 0.19.0 when built. To fix this inconsistency, 0.19.2 was tagged with the correct version information.

Notable new features

• A new doc module provides access to the documentation of builtin modules.

• A new conj command “appends” values to a list, and has a guaranteed time complexity independent of the size of the list.

• A new inexact-num converts its argument to an inexact number.

  It is functionally identical to the now deprecated float64 command since the Go float64 type is the only underlying inexact number type for now. Its behavior may change in future if there are more underlying types for inexact numbers.

• A new type of interactive abbreviation: edit:command-abbr (#1472).

• The order and compare commands now support boolean values (#1585).

• A new path:join command and path:separator and path:list-separator variables (#1562).

• A new runtime: module that contains paths important for the Elvish runtime (#1385, #1423).

• A new compact command that replaces consecutive runs of equal values with a single copy, similar to the Unix uniq command.

• The order command has a new &key option (#1570).

• A new benchmark command has been added (#1586).

• When checking compilation errors, Elvish no longer stops after the first error found. For example, if $a and $b are both not defined, echo $a $b now yields two errors. This applies to both the interactive REPL and elvish -compile-only.

• When using an unimported builtin modules from the REPL, the REPL now shows the use command needed to import it, which can be executed from a key binding. This functionality is bound to Ctrl-A by default.

• New variables exposing the terminal and null device in an OS-agnostic fashion: $path:dev-tty and $path:dev-null. They are /dev/tty and /dev/null on Unix, and CON and NUL on Windows (#1633).

Breaking changes

• When a styled or styled-segment is printed to terminal, the resulting sequence will now always ignore any existing SGR state.

• Symbolic links are now always treated as ordinary files by the global modifiers type:dir and type:regular in wildcard expansions.

• Support for shared vars has been removed, along with its API (store:shared-var, store:set-shared-var and store:del-shared-var).

• The try command no longer supports the except keyword. It has been superseded by the catch keyword.

Deprecated features

Deprecated features will be removed in 0.20.0.

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

• The float64 command is now deprecated. Use num for constructing a typed number, or inexact-num for constructing an inexact number.

  The documentation has advertised it as deprecated since the 0.16.0 release, but deprecation warnings were never added.

Notable bugfixes

• Temporary assignment on an unset environment variables no longer leave it set to an empty string (#1448).

• Broken symbolic links no longer terminate a wildcard expansion prematurely (#1240).

• On Windows, command completion for executables now also works for local files.