| # Introduction | |
| Hello, and welcome to the Nushell project. | |
| The goal of this project is to take the Unix philosophy of shells, where pipes connect simple commands together, and bring it to the modern style of development. | |
| Thus, rather than being either a shell, or a programming language, Nushell connects both by bringing a rich programming language and a full-featured shell together into one package. | |
| Nu takes cues from a lot of familiar territory: traditional shells like bash, object based shells like PowerShell, gradually typed languages like TypeScript, functional programming, systems programming, and more. But rather than trying to be a jack of all trades, Nu focuses its energy on doing a few things well: | |
| - Being a flexible cross-platform shell with a modern feel | |
| - Solving problems as a modern programming language that works with the structure of your data | |
| - Giving clear error messages and clean IDE support | |
| ## This Book | |
| The book is split into chapters which are further broken down into sections. | |
| You can click on the chapter headers to get more information about it. | |
| - [Getting Started](getting_started.md) teaches you how to install Nushell and shows you the ropes. It also explains some of the design principles where Nushell differs from typical shells, such as bash. | |
| - [Nu Fundamentals](nu_fundamentals.md) explains basic concepts of the Nushell language. | |
| - [Programming in Nu](programming_in_nu.md) dives more deeply into the language features and shows several ways how to organize and structure your code. | |
| - [Nu as a Shell](nu_as_a_shell.md) focuses on the shell features, most notably the configuration and environment. | |
| - [Coming to Nu](coming_to_nu.md) is intended to give a quick start for users coming from other shells or languages. | |
| - [Design Notes](design_notes.md) has in-depth explanation of some of the Nushell's design choices. | |
| - [(Not So) Advanced](advanced.md) includes some more advanced topics (they are not _so_ advanced, make sure to check them out, too!). | |
| ## The Many Parts of Nushell | |
| The Nushell project consists of multiple different repositories and subprojects. | |
| You can find all of them under [our organization on GitHub](https://github.com/nushell). | |
| - The main Nushell repository can be found [here](https://github.com/nushell/nushell). It is broken into multiple crates that can be used as independent libraries in your own project, if you wish so. | |
| - The repository of our [nushell.sh](https://www.nushell.sh) page, including this book, can be found [here](https://github.com/nushell/nushell.github.io). | |
| - Nushell has its own line editor which [has its own repository](https://github.com/nushell/reedline) | |
| - [`nu_scripts`](https://github.com/nushell/nu_scripts) is a place to share scripts and modules with other users until we have some sort of package manager. | |
| - [Nana](https://github.com/nushell/nana) is an experimental effort to explore graphical user interface for Nushell. | |
| - [Awesome Nu](https://github.com/nushell/awesome-nu) contains a list of tools that work with the Nushell ecosystem: plugins, scripts, editor extension, 3rd party integrations, etc. | |
| - [Nu Showcase](https://github.com/nushell/showcase) is a place to share works about Nushell, be it blogs, artwork or something else. | |
| - [Request for Comment (RFC)](https://github.com/nushell/rfcs) serves as a place to propose and discuss major design changes. While currently under-utilized, we expect to use it more as we get closer to and beyond 1.0. | |
| ## Contributing | |
| We welcome contributions! | |
| [As you can see](#the-many-parts-of-nushell), there are a lot of places to contribute to. | |
| Most repositories contain `CONTRIBUTING.md` file with tips and details that should help you get started (if not, consider contributing a fix!). | |
| Nushell itself is written in [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org). | |
| However, you do not have to be a Rust programmer to help. | |
| If you know some web development, you can contribute to improving this website or the Nana project. | |
| [Dataframes](dataframes.md) can use your data processing expertise. | |
| If you wrote a cool script, plugin or integrated Nushell somewhere, we'd welcome your contribution to `nu_scripts` or Awesome Nu. | |
| Discovering bugs with reproduction steps and filing GitHub issues for them is a valuable help, too! | |
| You can contribute to Nushell just by using Nushell! | |
| Since Nushell evolves fast, this book is in a constant need of updating. | |
| Contributing to this book does not require any special skills aside from a basic familiarity with Markdown. | |
| Furthermore, you can consider translating parts of it to your language. | |
| ## Community | |
| The main place to discuss anything Nushell is our [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/NtAbbGn). | |
| You can also follow us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nu_shell) for news and updates. | |
| Finally, you can use the GitHub discussions or file GitHub issues. | |