Thanks to the fact that I sometimes share coding videos on my YouTube channel, people occasionally see what my workflow looks like and they ask me what plugins I’m using. This is non-exhaustive, really just intended to be a canned response.

Shell - Nushell

I’ve been using Nushell as my daily driver shell for the past few years. It’s really cool! Imagine if your shell had first-class support for structured data, had useful error messages, and removed all the esoteric syntax of bash in favor of something that looks much closer to a modern scripting language. There are still some rough edges, but it’s nothing that’s been a detrement to my workflows. It’s easy enough to shell out to bash/zsh if absolutely required.

Here’s an example: the watch program re-runs the given command at a fixed time interval that you give it. If I wanted to pull the contents of a webpage every 10s, I could do this:

watch -n10 curl https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell

But what if I wanted to do something with the output of that command instead of getting all of it in the output?

watch -n10 curl https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell | jq .license
<hangs forever>

Since watch is just taking a command as a string and executing it, the shell’s argument parser thinks that the pipe is a part of the next command and it tries to feed the output of watch itself to jq, instead of feeding it the output of curl. We can get around this via quoting

watch -n10 'curl https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell | jq .license'

But as commands like this start to get more complex, we run into bash’s weird quoting behavior. Let’s contrast this with a similar command in Nushell. At time of writing, there is not a direct replacement for watch available in Nushell, but it’s relatively straightforward to put together the primitives it does provide into a similar tool.

loop {
    clear # clear the screen so we don't see stale output
    curl https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell | jq .license # run the thing we care about
    sleep 10sec # wait the amount of time we care about
}

This has a number of differences to the standard watch program:

• There is a “block” that all of the commands run in, this allows for much simpler nesting than quotes
• The sleep command takes a duration type rather than just a number, so there’s no ambiguity as to what a 10 means
• We didn’t need to re-implement shell parsing, as a number of standard shell programs do when they take in other commands like watch does

If we wanted to package this as a function like watch so that it was a little easier to use, we can do that as well.

def watch [--sleep_time(-t):duration = 1sec, cmd: block] {
    loop {
        clear
        do $cmd
        sleep $sleep_time
    }
}

watch -t 10sec { curl https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell | jq .license }

We even get some basic parameter documentation for free!

watch -h

Usage:
  > watch {flags} <cmd>

Flags:
  -t, --sleep_time <Duration> -
  -h, --help - Display the help message for this command

Parameters:
  cmd <block>:

Nushell has a number of features that I think make it a great shell, and I’m not going to go into all of them here. Check out their documentation for more information!

Prompt - Starship

Starship is a very cool, very fast promt that works across a number of shells. I used to use it back when I used zsh, and I continue to use it today in Nushell. I do not have any custom starship configs, I just use the defaults.

Editor - VSCode

I use Visual Studio Code with a number of plugins. I use the default VSCode dark theme.

Plugin - crates

crates shows you what dependencies in your Cargo.toml files are up-to-date and which ones need updating.

Plugin - Error Lens

Error Lens puts diagnostic error messages in your editor view, so it’s much easier to see where you’ve gone wrong. It’s not specific to Rust at all, it works with anything that outputs diagnostics via the standard VSCode APIs.

Plugin - GitLens

GitLens provides additional functionality on top of the built in VSCode git features.

Plugin - rust-analyzer

rust-analyzer is the official Rust plugin for VSCode that provides autocomplete and error checking.