Nushell

Nushell (or Nu) is an open-source, cross-platform shell written in Rust, created by Jonathan Turner and maintained by a large contributor community. It rethinks the Unix pipeline: where Bash passes raw text between commands, Nushell pipelines carry typed, structured data. ls returns a table with typed columns for name, size, and modified date; open package.json returns a navigable data structure. That means you can filter, sort, select, and aggregate with built-in commands (where, sort-by, get, select) instead of reaching for grep, awk, sed, or jq.

The shell speaks JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV, TSV, XML, SQLite, Excel, and INI natively, has over 300 built-in commands, a plugin system for extensions in Rust, Python, or any language, context-aware completions, and clear error messages that catch type mismatches at parse time. The honest tradeoff: Nushell is not POSIX-compatible, so Bash one-liners and scripts need porting, and the ecosystem of community snippets is still smaller than Bash or Zsh. It is free, MIT-licensed, and runs on Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows.

Install via Homebrew (brew install nushell), your distro package manager, the install script from nushell.sh, or cargo install nu. Run nu to start the shell, or set it as your login shell. Configuration lives in ~/.config/nushell/config.nu (behavior) and env.nu (environment and prompt), both plain Nu scripts you can edit directly.