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33 lines
912 B
Markdown
33 lines
912 B
Markdown
# Philosophy
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> This document contains philosophical notes about nu.
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## Bare Words
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In Nu, bare words work the same way they do in most shells.
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In most shells, bare words serve two purposes:
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```bash
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$ ls
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# ^^ the name of a command
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$ cat Cargo.toml
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# ^^^^^^^^^^ a string
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```
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Nu adopts this shell idiom.
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Consequences:
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- Bare words cannot also refer to variables. Variable names are prefixed with `$`.
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- Bare words, in almost all contexts, cannot be keywords.
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- Numbers and operators aren't bare words.
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## One Screen
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The utility of a command's output drops off extremely rapidly after a full screen of content.
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By default, Nu prefers to present output that can fit into a screen rather than more complete output that spans many screens.
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For example, this is the rationale for `ls` returning a flat table containing the files in the current directory, rather than presenting a tree of data by default.
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