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.

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.

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.

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.

The string module contains a lot of useful commands to work with strings. If you want to join several values from a list into a single string you can use the str join command. The command accepts as argument the character(s) to use for joining the values. If you don’t specify the character(s) as argument the default value '' (empty string) is used.

Groovy 5 adds the interleave method to the Iterable class. With this method you can interleave elements from two iterables. The result is a new List with elements where the first element is the first element of the first iterable and the second element the first element of the second iterable and so on. The size of the smallest collection is used to keep interleaving elements. Elements from the larger collection are ignored in the result.
If you want to have the items from the largest collection in the resulting list you can use the value true as second argument for the interleave method.

Since Groovy 1.8.2 the next and previous methods are added to the Character class. When you invoke the method next on a char or Character instance the next character the next character of the ASCII table is returned. And when you use the previous method the previous character is returned.
Groovy 5 adds an overloaded version of the next and previous method that accepts an int argument. With this argument you can specify the number of characters to skip before returning the next or previous character. For example 'a'.next(2) return 'c' and 'c'.previous(2) returns 'a'.

Groovy 5 adds the extension methods zip and zipAll for iterables and iterators. Using the method you can combine elements from two collections into a new collection. The new collection contains Tuple2 instances where the values come from the items at the same index from both collections. So the first item of the first collection is grouped with the first item of the second collection. The size of the resulting collection is determined by the size of the smallest collection that is zipped.
With the zipAll method you can combine iterables of different sizes and set default values for missing items. It is possible to set a default value if an item is missing from the first iterable or the second iterable.

Since Java 9 the methods requireNonNullElse and requireNonNullElseGet are part of the java.util.Objects class. The method requireNonNullElse accepts two arguments. The first argument is an object that will be returned if that object is not null. The second argument is an object to be returned when the first argument is null. With this method you can replace the following ternary operator if (a != null) ? a : b (or if (a == null) ? b : a) with Objects.requireNonNullElse(a, b).
The method requireNonNullElseGet allows to define a Supplier function as second argument. The Supplier is only invoked when the first argument is null, so it is lazy and will only be invoked when the first argument is null.