2017-07-03

Elvish 0.9 release notes

Version 0.9 has been released to coincide with the official publication of the Elvish website, which will be hosting all release notes in the future.

This version is released slightly more than a month after 0.8. Despite the short interval, there are some interesting additions and changes.

Breaking Changes

  • Lists have become immutable.

    Support for assigning individual list elements has been temporarily removed. For instance, the following is no longer possible:

    li = [lorem ipsum foo bar]
li[1] = not-ipsum

    You need to use this for now:

    li = [(explode $li[:1]) not-ipsum (explode $li[2:])]

    Element assignment will be reintroduced as a syntax sugar, after the conversion to persistent data structure is finished.

    Assignments to map elements are not affected.

  • The true and false builtin commands have been removed. They have been equivalent to put $true and put $false for a while.

  • The default keybinding for last command mode has been changed from Alt-, to Alt-1.

  • The “bang mode” is now known as “last command mode”.

  • The le: module (for accessing the Elvish editor) has been renamed to edit:. You can do a simple substitution s/le:/edit:/g to fix your rc.elv.

  • The 3 listing modes – location mode, history listing mode and last command mode – are being merged into one generic listing mode.

    Most of their builtins have been merged: for instance, they use to come with their own builtins for changing focused candidate, le:loc:up, le:histlist:up and le:bang:up. These have been merged into simply edit:listing:up, that operates on whichever listing mode is active.

    A new binding table, $edit:binding[listing] has also been introduced. Bindings put there will be available in all 3 listing modes, with bindings in their own tables ($edit:binding[loc], $edit:binding[histlist] and $edit:binding[lastcmd]) having higher precedence.

  • The readline-style binding module has been renamed from embedded:readline-binding to just readline-binding. Future embedded modules will no longer have an embedded: prefix either.

Notable Fixes and Enhancements

  • This release has seen more progress towards breaking up the huge, untested edit package. For instance, the syntax highlighter and command history helpers now live in their own packages, and have better test coverages.

  • An experimental web interface has been added. It can be used by supplying the -web flag when running Elvish, i.e. elvish -web. The default port is 3171, which is a way to write “ELVI”. An alternative port can be specified using -port, e.g. elvish -web -port 2333.

  • Per-session command history has been reintroduced (#355).

  • Elvish now forks a daemon for mediating access to the database. This is to prepare for the switch to a pure Go database and removing the current C dependency on SQLite. A new daemon: module has been introduced.

  • A new edit:complex-candidate builtin has been introduced to construct complex candidates from completers.

  • A new re: module, containing regular expression utilities, has been introduced.

Known Issues

The daemon implementation has a known issue of some intermediate process not being reaped correctly and there is an outstanding pull request for it. In the worst case, this will leave 2 processes hanging in the system.