Scala / Cats: How to unzip an NonEmptyList

You don't have to do it all in one traversal, and often you don't even want to use one of the parts. I would write it like:

(nel.map(_._1), nel.map(_._2))

This avoids the awkward conversion away from an NEL and back.

You could simply call nel.toList and use the standard l.unzip and then NonEmptyList.fromList(unziped_list) on the result.

Edit: As @Dylan said, you could also use .fromListUnsafe to get rid of the option.