nushell/docs/philosophy.md

Philosophy

This document contains philosophical notes about nu.

Bare Words

In Nu, bare words work the same way they do in most shells.

In most shells, bare words serve two purposes:

$ ls
# ^^ the name of a command
$ cat Cargo.toml
#     ^^^^^^^^^^ a string

Nu adopts this shell idiom.

Consequences:

• Bare words cannot also refer to variables. Variable names are prefixed with $.
• Bare words, in almost all contexts, cannot be keywords.
• Numbers and operators aren't bare words.

One Screen

The utility of a command's output drops off extremely rapidly after a full screen of content.

By default, Nu prefers to present output that can fit into a screen rather than more complete output that spans many screens.

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.