Welcome to the second issue of Elvish Newsletter!

Elvish is a shell that seeks to combine a full-fledged programming language with a friendly user interface. This newsletter is a summary of its progress and future plans.

Release of 0.10 Version

This newsletter accompanies the release of the 0.10 version. This release contains 125 commits, with contributions from @xofyarg, @tw4452852, @ALSchwalm, @zhsj, @HeavyHorst, @silvasur, @zzamboni, @Chilledheart, @myfreeweb, @xchenan and @jiujieti.

Elvish used to depend on SQLite for storage. As a result, compiling Elvish relied on cgo and required a C compiler. This release sees the switch to BoltDB, making Elvish a pure-Go project. Elvish can now be compiled much faster, and into a fully statically linked binary. Cross-compilation is also much easier, as the Go compiler has fantastic cross-compiling support.

Maps ([&k=v &k2=v2]) are now implemented using persistent hash maps. This concludes the transition to persistent data structures for all primary data types (strings, lists, maps). Persistent data structures are immutable, and thus have a simpler semantics and are automatically concurrency-safe. This does have an interesting impact on the semantics of assignments, which is now documented in a new section on the unique semantics page.

For a complete list of changes, see the release notes.

Community

• We now have an official list of awesome unofficial Elvish libraries: elves/awesome-elvish. Among others, we now have at least two very advanced prompt themes, chain.elv from @zzamboni and powerline.elv from @muesli :)

• Diego Zamboni (@zzamboni), the author of chain.elv, has written very passionately on Elvish: Elvish, an awesome Unix shell.

• Patrick Callahan has given an awesome talk on Delightful Command-Line Experiences, featuring Elvish as a “very lively, ambitious shell”.

• Elvish is now packaged in Debian.

• The number of followers to @RealElvishShell has grown to 23.

Plans

The mid-term remains the same as in the previous issue: stabilizing the language core and enhancing usability of the user interface.

The short-term plan is captured in the milestone for the 0.11 version. Among other things, 0.11 is expected to ship with epm, the standard package manager for Elvish, and a more responsive interface by running prompts and completions asynchronously. Stay very tuned.

Conclusions

In the last newsletter, I predicted that we will be featuring Elvish for Python Users and Tetris in Your Shell in a future newsletter. It seems we are getting close to that pretty steadily.

Have fun with Elvish!

- xiaq