Piping files into helix with nushell

I’m fairly new to nushell’s syntax and this took a few minutes to figure out. This really serves as a note to self until it’s in my muscle memory.

#Scenario

I want to search for a bunch of files in a project and open them all in my text editor.

The incantation to use is:

hx ...(rg -l term | split row "\n")

Breaking down this command:

rg -l term finds all files matching term in the current directory with ripgrep. The -l flag lists only the file names, not the locations of the matches.

split row "\n" turns the output into a nushell datatable, the rows for which are delimited by the newline character.

We use string interpolation to turn this into arguments for helix with ( and ). And finally, we use the spread operator (...) to denote this is a list that we’re interpolating.