Elvish is an expressive programming language and a versatile interactive shell, combined into one seamless package. It runs on Linux, BSDs, macOS and Windows.

Despite its pre-1.0 status, it is already suitable for most daily interactive use.

User groups (all connected thanks to Matrix):

Documentation for Elvish lives on the official website https://elv.sh, including:

Learning material

Reference docs, including the language reference, the elvish command, and all the modules in the standard library

Blog posts, including release notes

The source for the documentation is in the website directory.

All source files use the BSD 2-clause license (see LICENSE), except for the following:

Files in pkg/diff and pkg/rpc are released under the BSD 3-clause license, since they are copied from Go's source code. See pkg/diff/LICENSE and pkg/rpc/LICENSE.

Files in pkg/persistent and its subdirectories are released under EPL 1.0, since they are partially derived from Clojure's source code. See pkg/persistent/LICENSE.

Files in pkg/md/spec are released under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, since they are derived from the CommonMark spec. See pkg/md/spec/LICENSE.

Most users do not need to build Elvish from source. Prebuilt binaries for the latest commit are provided for Linux amd64, macOS amd64, macOS arm64, Windows amd64 and many other platforms.

To build Elvish from source, you need

A supported OS: Linux, {Free,Net,Open}BSD, macOS, or Windows 10. Windows 10 support is experimental.

Go >= 1.19.

To build Elvish from source, run one of the following commands:

The go install command installs Elvish to $GOBIN; the binary name is elvish. You can control the installation location by overriding $GOBIN, for example by prepending env GOBIN=... to the go install command.

If $GOBIN is not set, the installation location defaults to $GOPATH/bin, which in turn defaults to ~/go/bin if $GOPATH is also not set.

The installation directory is probably not in your OS's default $PATH. You should either either add it to $PATH, or manually copy the Elvish binary to a directory already in $PATH.

Elvish has several build variants with slightly different feature sets. For example, the withpprof build variant has profiling support.

These build variants are just alternative main packages. For example, to build the withpprof variant, run the following command (change the part after @ to get different versions):

If you are modifying Elvish's source code, you will want to clone Elvish's Git repository and build Elvish from the local source tree instead. To do this, run the following from the root of the source tree:

There is no need to specify a version like @master; when inside a source tree, go install will always use the whatever source code is present.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more notes for contributors.

Elvish has experimental support for building and importing plugins, modules written in Go. It relies on Go's plugin support, which is only available on a few platforms.

Plugin support requires building Elvish with cgo. The official prebuilt binaries are built without cgo for compatibility and reproducibility, but by default the Go toolchain builds with cgo enabled.

If you have built Elvish from source on a platform with plugin support, your Elvish build probably already supports plugins. To force cgo to be used when building Elvish, you can do the following:

To build a plugin, see this example.

See PACKAGING.md for notes for packagers.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for notes for contributors.

See SECURITY.md for how to report security issues.