To check if a string value starts or ends with a given string you can use the str starts-with and str ends-with commands. The command returns a boolean value: true if the string starts or ends with the given string and false otherwise. The commands are case sensitive by default. You can use the --ignore-case (or the shorthand -i) to ignore casing while checking if a the string starts or ends with a given string.
To input can be a string value and then that string value is checked. If the input is an array of string values, then each element is checked. It is also possible to check values in a record or table. You need to pass the names of the field(s) or column(s) that you want to check the string values of.

Did you know that you can include LaTeX snippets in Markdown and AsciiDoc documents? For writing a scientific or technical document pure LaTeX is still the best choice. But if you want to write a Markdown or AsciiDoc document that needs to contain some math snippets, you can. Here is how.

A lot of commands have output displayed as table. It is possible to use different themes for tables. If you run the command table --list you get all available themes. At the moment the following themes are available: basic, compact, compact_double, default, heavy, light, none, reinforced, rounded, thin, with_love, psql, markdown, dots, restructured, ascii_rounded, basic_compact, single, double. You can use a theme with the table command by using the --theme option and the name of the theme. For example to have a different table theme for the ls command you can use ls | table --theme light.
If you want to change the theme for all table output you can set the configuration option $env.config.table.mode. To make this configuration setting permanent you can add it to config.nu file.

The day before yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend Kotlin Dev Day. The event featured five parallel lanes, so my experience reflects just one perspective, yours could be completely different. Join me as I share the highlights of my day!

When you start Nushell you can see a nice ASCII art elephant. That is Ellie a cute and friendly elephant mascot for Nushell. Elephants are popular as you can see them in other products like Mastodon and Gradle. It is possible to summon Ellie in your Nushell environment by running the ellie command. This command is part of the std library and you need to run use std ellie or std use * first.

Groovy 5 adds the extension methods getExtension and getBaseName to the File and Path classes. You can invoke them as properties for a File and Path objects. Also the asBoolean method is added. This mean you can use a File or Path instance in a boolean context. If the underlying file exists true is returned and false otherwise.

If you want to use AI for coding, there are plenty of tools to choose from. Popular options include GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Gemini. But what if you’d rather not send your code to external services? Now that computers are becoming more powerful, is it possible to run a large language model locally and use it as your own coding assistant?

To get the names of columns in a table or the keys of a record you can use the columns command. The command returns a list of string values that are the column or key names. When the input is table the column names are returned, and when the input is a record the names of the keys are returned.

Groovy (and Java) support using names for groups in regular expressions. The name of the group is defined using the syntax ?<name> where name must be replaced with the actual group name. This is very useful, because you can use the group name to access the value that is captured by the defined regular expression in a java.util.regex.Matcher object. Groovy supports for a long time accessing a group using the index operator. Since Groovy 5 you can use the name of the group to access the value as well. You can specify the name between square brackets ([<name>]) or use the name as property.

The build-in HTTP client in Nushell can be used to interact with REST APIs and websites. If the URL you want to invoke has query parameters than you can use the url build-query command. The url build-query command transforms a record or table to URL encoded key/value pairs joined with an ampersand (&). Each key and value is separated by an equal sign (=). The command can expand a key with a list value to separate key/value pairs with the same key if the key is defined in a record.