9 ms·

Fish Shell 3.2

280 points by zanchey 6y ago

xerxesaa 6y ago
Don't have anything to add to this except to say thanks to the team for an amazing product. Been using fish shell for 5+ years now and I love it. "Finally, a command line shell for the 90s"!
- drcongo 6y ago
  I'd like to echo that, I _love_ fish. This looks like a huge release from the changelog.
- joseluisq 6y ago
  Many of us use it, I personally in my daily basis development Fish shell is pretty neat and increases productivity in terminal. However I still use Bash in the server side where I need for example, explicit error aborting like `set -e` that Fish doesn't have yet. https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510
  - Siecje 6y ago
    set -e is not great and is not recommended. http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105 http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105
    - joseluisq 6y ago
      Agree with the "false positives" however in combination with error handling I don't see why not use it.
    - _jal 6y ago
      -e is in the class of things that can be fine to use, but the people least-likely to be prepared to know when it can be are the most likely to expect it to behave better than it does. Sort of a combination finger-trap/cigar cutter for newbies.
      - joseluisq 6y ago
        Yeah.. but still useful despite the "false positives" that the link states which are addressable with proper error handling.
        tadfisher 6y ago
        `-eu -o pipefail` catches most of what newcomers expect anyway.
    - rgoulter 6y ago
      I read this as "bash has unintuitive footguns" rather than "set -e has unintuitive footguns with its usage".
      - oblio 6y ago
        Bash doesn't have unintuitive footguns, bash <<is>> a unintuitive footgun :-)
    - t0astbread 6y ago
      I agree with the second to last recommendation: > rking's personal recommendation is to go ahead and use set -e, but beware of possible gotchas. It has useful semantics, so to exclude it from the toolbox is to give into FUD. Manual error handling would be ideal but it's too easy for me to mess up and miss something. Plus, if you really wanted to catch everything with proper error handling you would need to wrap every command in your script.
  - giantandroids 6y ago
    if you use a bash shebang in your scripts, does it not matter (honest question, I never have used fish)?
Zhyl 6y ago
I'm surprised that Fish isn't used more for education. I don't know of any distros aimed at new users which have fish as the default. I don't think I've seen any tutorials that use fish to teach shell concepts. It seems like such a missed opportunity, especially at a time when Linux Gaming is on the rise. There's a whole audience that would have the activation energy of getting into shell scripting lowered by being slightly more friendly and approachable than bash. I feel like fish is the python of shells, and python has more than proved that a language being 'easy' and approachable makes it much more appealing to a wider audience.
- hashkb 6y ago
  Off topic: I came back to Python after a few years and WOW the LSP is fast and helpful. Maybe that's always been the case but after Typescript forced me to turn my vim into an IDE, Python really outshines it on the tooling. Edit: the point is that I should try fish too. Great user friendly tooling isn't just for beginners.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- patrickmcnamara 6y ago
  This is probably due to the fact that fish isn't 100% POSIX compliant. A lot of commands new users see on the web won't work properly in fish shell. For example, you couldn't set environment variables for one command in fish like you could in other shells until the last minor version (3.1). I'm glad fish is becoming more like other more standard shells while maintaining its user-friendliness.
- himujjal 6y ago
  > I feel like fish is the python of shells There is actually python for shell. Check out https://xon.sh https://xon.sh
  - kseistrup 6y ago
    And Marcel the Shell ⌘ https://www.marceltheshell.org/ https://www.marceltheshell.org/
awalGarg 6y ago
As someone with a teeny tiny commit in this release and a maintained personal fork, I feel compelled to say that the biggest benefit of fish over bash/zsh for me is not just the OOTB completions UX etc., but also how much more approachable it is to hacking. I would never even bother reading the source code of bash again, let alone try to patch it, because I have 0 confidence that something completely unrelated is not gonna break.
joseluisq 6y ago
Wow many improvements especially in the scripting. Definitely I will try it out. BTW I still waiting for https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510 Congrats for the release!
bogdan 6y ago
Fish is my favourite shell because among other things, it has the best support for vi key bindings. I have been using the master version of it without any issues for more than half a year now for the undo / redo support and I'm glad the team has finally released it to stable. Thanks to everyone who worked on this! If anyone is reading this and is using vi mode with bash or zsh, give fish a try, it's so much better!
- Erlangen 6y ago
  > If anyone is reading this and is using vi mode with bash or zsh, give fish a try, it's so much better! Great to hear that. I am using vi key bindings wherever it's possible, for example, text editing, Firefox(vimium) and file manager(ranger). But I have never been able to figure out how to use vi mode effectively in the shell prompt. The last time since I tried vi mode in shell was at least 5 years ago. I could roughly remember that vi mode bindings conflicted with certain oh-my-fish plugins I had installed. Even worse factor was that, I didn't know how to do certain things in vi mode, for example "M-." key to yank last argument from previous command. So I gave it up in the end. Would you mind sharing what plugins do you use? And how do you work efficiently with vi mode? Thanks ahead.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    I’m a die-hard vim user and a fish developer but (gasp!) I don’t use vi mode in fish or any other shell. Alt-V will open $EDITOR with the command line contents preloaded into the buffer and update the prompt on exit, I find that to be good enough without the frustration of trying to convert the prompt into a text editor when it’s not.
    - cameroncairns 6y ago
      This alone might convince me to start using fish again. Thanks for the tip!
- umanwizard 6y ago
  That's odd. bash and zsh had leagues better vi bindings the last time I tried. fish had tons of weird errors, most notably that things like `d2w` simply don't work. I actually had to stop using fish and go back to zsh because I couldn't get past the lack of vi support. Apparently, https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/4019 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/4019 still has not been fixed. There's no similar issue in bash/zsh.
sdfjkl 6y ago
Fish is my shell of choice for a couple years now. Not because it's the perfect shell, but because it's a lot better than any other for interactive shells. For scripting I still stick to bash because it's more portable and I already know how to cope with its warts. And sometimes when I can't remember the fish syntax by heart, I just launch a bash from inside fish to run my command and then Ctrl-D :-)
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  I switched to fish a very long time ago (2009 maybe?) because it started up so much faster than zsh w/ all the plugins that it took to get the fancy features fish had out of the box. Since then, fish has only become a lot faster as we have focused on performance and optimizations considerably.
  - sdfjkl 6y ago
    I tried zsh after fish and my impression was somewhat like this: Okay, so I got to do a lot of customizing to get this to work nearly as well as fish does out of the box - can't be bothered!
    - jonfw 6y ago
      My impression of ZSH after fish is "ok this made for a really annoying couple of hours to set things up, but now I'll never have an incompatibility hassle again!" When I was in school and working on my own stuff I liked using fringe shells like xonsh and fish, but working in teams I feel like I need a pretty significant productivity increase to justify using a different tool than everybody else.
      - t0astbread 6y ago
        Unless you source a lot of shared scripts why would it matter what shell you use interactively? You can install fish and bash side by side and use one in your terminal and one for scripting.
mejutoco 6y ago
Fish is my shell of choice, like many in this thread. To me it just works, without configuring anything (ok, maybe a couple of aliases), with great defaults. As an example, type anything(for instance, '.conf') + up arrow, and there you see all the completions (for instance, 'less /etc/postgresql/10/main/pg_hba.conf' shows for me) based on the shell history. You can then cycle through them with up/down arrows. It is the same as ctrl+R in bash, but so discoverable and plain. I found tons of similar details in fish. Edit: typos
- ducktective 6y ago
  For this specific use-case, ctrl+R + fzf works nicely.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    We’ve added some improvements in this release that should make that a better experience by improving the performance of `history` when piped to fzf (or anything else). The output was previously buffered and GNU wide character comparison/conversion is insanely slow so that had to be hacked around.
- lorenzfx 6y ago
  It really is my pet peeve with fish, but the last command that started with what you typed cannot be completed that way. For that, you need to use right-arrow. I kept a fork of fish for that purpose for some time, but that was really too much hassle and I went back to zsh. Which is pretty sad, because otherwise fish is amazing.
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    ctrl + e or end will complete commands in that case
    - sixstringtheory 6y ago
      IIUC, right-arrow also does, and option-right-arrow will complete individual arguments from the last command one by one (macOS).
ducktective 6y ago
I always see these posts, get tempted to use fish instead of bash but then I ask the ubiquity question and end up saying "Not today..."
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  The ubiquity question?
  - ducktective 6y ago
    bash is installed by default on pretty much everything but for fish I need to un-learn bash shenanigans like `esac` which I fear would hurt more than help in general. Either that, or maybe I'm just lazy and missing out on a nice tool...
    - ComputerGuru 6y ago
      Fish made me write better bash scripts because it gave me a proper understanding of IFS, test, and other shell “basics” since it removes a layer of automagic by simplifying the syntax. Eg fish discourages the use of `if [` and it makes you realize that the bracket isn’t a grammatical construct but rather a terribly named command.
    - acdha 6y ago
      I switched entirely for interactive use a couple of years ago and have only had positive things to say. I still use Bash for scripts but that’s exclusively scripts which I edit in a real editor with version control, 100% shellcheck, etc. and even then I’ve been rewriting most non-trivial scripts into Python for the last decade so it gets sane error handling and data structures, not to mention usually ending up being shorter due to the richer library.
- epicide 6y ago
  If you mean for script portability: you can still easily call scripts with bash directly. For scripts that modify the environment, use bass. If you mean that you still have to use bash on other machines: yeah, I feel you there. At least for me, I'm fortunate that if I end up using a machine frequently, I can just install fish and add my config/dot files.
jorgebucaran 6y ago
Thank you Zanchey, Ridiculousfish, Fabian, and everyone else!
SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
I think Fish is an excellent interactive shell. I've still got Bash as my default shell for non-interactive sessions, but I configured Konsole to start Fish by default for interactive use (Settings->Command, set to the path to the fish executable). That way scripts that need Bash still work, but I get a sane environment for interaction. For "portable" scripts I write POSIX shell, C, or Python, depending on what I need to be portable to. fish_add_path will solve one of the few annoying things about Fish. I've been looking at trying Oil as a Bash replacement though, I think Oil for scripting + Fish for interaction might be a best-of-both-worlds setup.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Fwiw fish_add_path doesn’t fundamentally change anything, users do get confused between global and universal variables and how they interact with exported variables like PATH, so this just makes it friendlier.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
    It also helps prevent duplicate path entries. I'd written an "add_to_path_if_not_present" function, but "fish_add_path" should do the same thing. It's just convenience, but Fish is largely about convenience.
- berlinquin 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I have a debian box that I try keep as standard as possible, and I think this setup would fit my environment well.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Shebangs direct scripts to the right interpreter. Setting a default interactive shell won’t override it.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
    True, but there do exist (crappy) scrips with incorrect shebangs. EG specifying `#!/bin/sh` when they should use `#!/usr/bin/env bash`, since `/bin/sh` isn't necessarily bash. Could be dash. Could be fish. Could be oil. Etc.)
mettamage 6y ago
I see a lot of enthusiasm for fish. Can someone point me to some resources that I can check? Not the best comparison but: vim has vimtutor, a couple of good vim games and so on. Is there anything for fish?
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  Honestly, fish is really simple. Just fire it up! You definitely don't need a vimtutor equivalent, you probably won't customize anything beyond the prompt, and the syntax weirdness is pretty intuitive, but you can always use `help function` or whatever to get docs. Here's the docs if you do want to read about it first: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/ https://fishshell.com/docs/current/
- groundCode 6y ago
  Someone already mentioned the official docs. They’re good. I also enjoyed https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/23/the-fish-shell-is-awesome/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/23/the-fish-shell-is-awesome/ which is a nice read though not a tutorial.
dysoncdn 6y ago
>A new "fish_add_path" helper function to add paths to $PATH Yes! Modifying PATH has always been cumbersome compared to bash-like shells. This is a welcome addition.
deleted 6y ago
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enriquto 6y ago
I'd like to use fish regularly, but I feel really attacked by the over-the-top usage of color and unrequested auto-completion. Even a "monochrome" theme I tried was shoveling many different shades of gray into my terminal. It does not seem to honor the NO_COLOR variable either. Is there any way to obtain a default configuration with everything disabled?
- e_proxus 6y ago
  It's a good point, but how many of the features are useful without any colors at all? At least the auto-completion would just look like any typed text. Perhaps fish is not for you?
  - ludwigschubert 6y ago
    I think it’s a fair ask - imagine using fish on a monochrome screen, for example. I could imagine using underlines or inverse text frontage autocomplete in such a theme/mode. Let’s see if someone here already knows such a theme, or gets inspired to make one. ;-)
  - enriquto 6y ago
    > Perhaps fish is not for you? It nearly is! I love fish powerful completion, just find it annoying that it is triggered automatically. Also fish syntax seems saner than bourne's, and I love it (but miss process substitution from time to time). Unfortunately, I cannot stand the flashiness. With some work, I have managed to disable all colors by setting a lot of fish_color variables in my configuration file. But the auto-completion drains me after a few minutes of use. As if you are speaking to somebody and they complete all your sentences! Even if the completion is correct, isn't that extremely annoying?
    - hibbelig 6y ago
      I think what you are talking about are the fish "suggestions". By default, that text is greyed out and if you like the suggestion, you can cursor-right (or ctrl-f) to accept it. But if you don't like the suggestion, you just keep typing. If my hunch (that you are talking about the suggestions) is correct, then perhaps it works to set it to white on white or black on black, or whatever matches your color scheme. It will still be there, but you won't see it :-). (But you would get it after cursor-right or end or ctrl-f or ctrl-e...)
xyst 6y ago
what's the difference between this and zsh? both seem to have the same set of features. also zsh is the default shell for macOS (as of Catalina)
- jacobsenscott 6y ago
  Fish has many more features out of box. To match fish with zsh you need to install many zsh plugins. Because the features are native to fish they are much faster in fish than zsh. Fish has a great help system and error messages. Fish is also a much cleaner programming language because it doesn't need to carry the historical quirks of bash, zsh, and posix. That said I wouldn't recommend using it as a programming language.
kbd 6y ago
Folks make a big deal about everything Fish gives you out of the box, but for someone who already has Zsh well–configured (eg. syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, fzf), can someone sell me on things I might be missing out on from Fish?
- spamizbad 6y ago
  Assuming zsh is already doing everything you want the biggest thing you're missing is speed.
  - kbd 6y ago
    "Speed" seems a vague claim. What are you referring to? Startup time, interactive use, scripting?
  - edoceo 6y ago
    WTF are you doing where shell "speed" is the bottleneck? How does it happen that your shell starts "slow". This post has lots of speed comments. I don't get it. Are bash pipes slower than others? Do folk have a shell that takes longer than 250ms to start?
    - anoki 6y ago
      I tried out many of the popular shells (bash, zsh, fish, etc) many years ago when my daily driver was an older thinkpad, and some of the startup times were painfully slow for me. It definitely drove me toward the more minimal shells like ksh and rc. On newer hardware it hasn't been noticeable, but it's real.
    - hjek 6y ago
      Not OP but fish's fuzzy autocomplete is snappy, especially on low-end hardware even when I mistype a lot, where zsh will often just freeze completely, for me at least.
- duckerude 6y ago
  Not having to fight against POSIX. Arrays are first-class, strings don't split when you don't want them to, things that could be builtins generally are builtins instead of inscrutable syntax. Command output is split on newlines, which turns out to work really well with most Unix tools and only breaks on the most pathological of filenames. The newbie-ism `for f in (ls)` isn't actually harmful in fish. Autocomplete definitions are very straightforward and declarative, so writing your own is easy. See https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/complete.html#example https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/complete.html#exampl.... zsh's system is more intimidating. (I even contributed completions for a few commands to this release of fish.)
acdha 6y ago
I put off switching from bash for years but quit cold turkey for fish a couple of years ago, and find myself appreciating that almost daily. One of the underappreciated values is that while you can configure it you get great functionality out of the box. Switching was chsh, picking a theme in the interactive config, and going back to work. The only I’ve really felt the need to do was to add the Terraform workspace to my prompt, which was quite easy.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  I made myself use Fish for a week as an experiment. Day one was a little rough. Day two was easier. On day three I decided to customize my prompt, and after seeing how trivially easy that was (you write a fish function called "fish_prompt" that uses shell commands to build your prompt) compared to Zsh or Bash, I was... hooked.
  - acdha 6y ago
    I definitely built up the switching costs in my head based on past experience with zsh. Good defaults are easy to undervalue.
erichurkman 6y ago
The performance fix for macOS [0] is very welcomed. I'll be glad to get rid of the ugly hacks in my fish config files. Looks like an amazing release all around. [0] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/7365 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/7365
pcr910303 6y ago
I used to really use fish pervasively in my computer, but after a while I realized that I forgot literally all of bash (like I forgot how for-loops look like, how word split works…) and I just switched back to macOS default zsh. I’m still wanting a fish-alike interative shell that improves on the Bourne shell language (and bash extensions). I’m having hopes on Oil shell [0], but it’s still in an early stage so I guess I’ll have to wait for a far future… [0]: https://oilshell.org https://oilshell.org
ddeville 6y ago
> Significant performance improvements to completion of the available commands (#7153), especially on macOS Big Sur where there was a significant regression (#7365, #7511). This is buried down in the Completion section but this is a big deal if you’ve upgraded to MacOS Big Sur: completing a command could hang the shell for 10-15 seconds making it nearly unusable. Thanks for fixing this!
- kstrauser 6y ago
  This made my morning.
meddlepal 6y ago
I used fish for a couple years but switched back to zsh. I found the incompatibilities with bash/zsh to be annoying at times and finally just decided to do the "When in Rome do as the Romans" do thing and adopt zsh.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  Same here. If you miss fish's smart auto-completion I can recommend this zsh plugin though: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
  - apetrovic 6y ago
    Sadly, this plugin is a pale copy of fish's power - it isn't folder-aware (fish will offer different suggestions for different folders) and it isn't context aware (fish will try to autocomplete the current line based on the context of the current folder, zsh-autosuggestion will just blindly offer history line that starts with what's typed)
    - jonfw 6y ago
      I just use tab complete if I want a file from my working directory, which I actually prefer. If anybody else is using zsh-autosuggestions, it's really worth looking into configuring it rather than using it out of the box. It exposes some pretty cool options. It was sub-par out of box in comparison to fish, but after some tweaking I like it better. You can do things like ignore history based completions on certain commands (like git, I don't need my last commit message popping up)
    - flohofwoe 6y ago
      zsh-autosuggestion definitely has per-folder suggestions, in normal day-to-day work I haven't seen a difference to fish so far (fish may have added features in the last two years that I'm not aware of, but the basic context-senstive suggestions are definitely supported).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jacobsenscott 6y ago
Fish has saved me from so many hours of zsh yak shaving. It is the best.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Love fish, but I always add the Bob the Fish theme which adds a really nice Powerline command line theme which effectively shows me current git status with just enough info to be useful much of the time.
diegocg 6y ago
>undo is bound to Control+Z, and redo to Alt+/ Unfortunate choice of keys for redo IMO
- duckerude 6y ago
  Control+Y is already taken, and Control+Shift+Z is indistinguishable from Control+Z because of terminal limitations. So I can't think of anything better.
- roryokane 6y ago
  It's not totally arbitrary, at least. In Emacs, Alt+/ is bound to Undo/Redo by default.
rtkaratekid 6y ago
When in college my prof dared me to switch from bash to fish (because he thought it would be a funny failure) and I'm still using it today. It's a fantastic shell!
kderbyma 6y ago
I forked fish for fun into ghoti
synthc 6y ago
I love fish, and have been using it as my shell for over 10 years, it's pretty much the first thing I install on a new system. I usually heavily tweak the settings of the applications I use, make my own custom themes etc, but the defaults of fish are so good that I hardly changed anything. I only installed 3 plugins (z,fzf,and virtualfish) and that's it, it's super productive. Completion from history, persistently setting enviroment variables, defining functions, the syntax, everything is much more ergonomic and sane than in bash. I'm sure you can tweak zsh or even bash to achieve something similar, but why bother? Also, i don't mind the incompatibility with bash: the fish language is much more sane, and you can easily use bash if needed.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  This is the exact reason I use Fish. The only thing I _need_ to get installed on random servers is Fish itself. No need to install and configure oh-my-$shell or other huge monstrosities. Most of my stuff comes from a simple homeshick[1] sync with a few files in it. [1] https://github.com/andsens/homeshick https://github.com/andsens/homeshick
- aembleton 6y ago
  Thank you for this comment. I had never come across fzf Fish plugin until now: https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish So easy to use.
geoelectric 6y ago
I used fish shell for a lot of years. Ultimately, I got tired of having to translate snippets for my use and went back to zsh for the bash compatibility. Zsh becoming the Mac default also gave me an incentive, because I prefer to use system native if it's anywhere near up to date. But a lot of what I have to cobble together in zsh via antigen and omz was batteries-included or fisherman-easy in fish. It's very powerful right out of the box. I miss it all the time, and it may get me back before it's done.
- triztian 6y ago
  Same here, used it for about a year but ultimately had to switch to bash/zsh variants because of compat. Servers were always bash and I always had to translate my fish scripts to zsh/bash shell when collaborating with colleagues. I wish it'd be more popular and preinstalled on servers and macOS.
stunt 6y ago
My favorite Fish plugins: - jorgebucaran/fisher - Plugin manager - IlanCosman/tide - Nice prompt with git status - jorgebucaran/humantime.fish - Turn milliseconds into a human-readable string in Fish. - franciscolourenco/done - Automatically receive notifications when long processes finish. - laughedelic/pisces - Helps you to work with paired symbols like () and '' in the command line. - jethrokuan/fzf - To integrate fzf (junegunn/fzf)
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  Seems like the author of jethrokuan/fzf sort of recommends using fzf.fish[1] if you don't need some of the features: > fzf.fish is a newer fzf plugin with very similar features. It lacks Tmux support and fzf tab completion, but includes functions for searching git log, git status, and browsing shell variables using fzf. Additionally, it is more likely to be maintained going forward. You can read more about the differences between it and this plugin in the README of fzf.fish here. From [1] (slightly condensed): > TLDR: choose fzf.fish over jethrokuan/fzf if you want faster, more efficient, code, code that is easier to debug if you encounter issues, a tool built on Unix philosophy, a plugin that is more likely to attract contributors because it is more maintainable and has CI, a plugin that will be more frequently updated by its author (Jethro no longer uses fish), features for searching git status, git log, and shell variables and you don't mind having to integrate fzf with Tmux yourself, which is easy to do, not having buggy fzf tab completion Seems like it can search git status/log as well. 1: https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish
mattgreenrocks 6y ago
Congrats on the release! Fish is a wonderful piece of software and keeps getting better. I don't miss zsh and the pages of configuration at all.
ElijahLynn 6y ago
Been using Fish for many years now, I love the abbreviations feature the most, as it auto expands and doesn't hide the magic!
ElijahLynn 6y ago
FINALLY!!!!!! A new "fish_add_path" helper function to add paths to $PATH without producing duplicates, to be used interactively or in config.fish (#6960, #7028). For example: fish_add_path /opt/mycoolthing/bin will add /opt/mycoolthing/bin to the beginning of $fish_user_path without creating duplicates, so it can be called safely from config.fish or interactively, and the path will just be there, once.
- trymas 6y ago
  YES. Just couple days ago I've mangled `config.fish` with wrong use of `$fish_user_path` and was wondering why my shell started throwing errors of `$PATH` being too long, which duplicated itself to infinity and beyond. That's what you get when you don't read the docs fully.
away_throw 6y ago
Probably my favorite feature with fish is the improved globs. I can do **.pdf to recursively get all pdfs or *{.flac,.mp3} to only get flac and mp3 files from a directory.
sontek 6y ago
I've been using fish for 3 months now after using Bash for 20. I'm probably going to switch back in the next few days. I LOVE fish but they went out of their way to not be compatible with Bash (like (pwd) instead of $(pwd) for expanding) that break a lot of existing scripts. The breaking point for me was when the rust/cargo env didn't work in it because they don't have compatible case statements.
- mekster 6y ago
  That is why I used fish only as a tool to write my own little scripts instead of using it as an interactive shell but not for the scripts that may be touched or used outside of me. Zsh with plenty of plugins makes it pretty convenient as a shell that is still compatible with most bash scripts.
PoignardAzur 6y ago
> A new special input function forward-single-char moves one character to the right, and if an autosuggestion is available, only take a single character from it (#7217, #4984). Huh. It feels super weird to see this finally hit release. Feels like a lifetime ago that I made this patch, I'd completely forgotten about it. Since then I've gone through another lockdown, quit my job, started a Rust GUI framework, and started doing self-employed consulting. Also it feels kind of humbling to think about the weeks I spent writing it, and then see that it's only a bullet point in a changelog that has hundreds of them (most of them a lot more useful than mine). Cheers to the fish community!
iamevn 6y ago
I absolutely love fish. Completions and colors and all that are nice but the killer feature for me is the scripting. I can actually throw a loop or a one-off function together for whatever random task I have and not have to worry about arcane syntax or weird gotchas. I used bash for years and anything that requires more than some pipes would either not get done or get done in a heavier-duty programming language. With fish things just made sense and I was immediately solving more complex problems at the shell.

280 points by zanchey 6y ago

Don't have anything to add to this except to say thanks to the team for an amazing product. Been using fish shell for 5+ years now and I love it. "Finally, a command line shell for the 90s"!

drcongo 6y ago
I'd like to echo that, I _love_ fish. This looks like a huge release from the changelog.
joseluisq 6y ago
Many of us use it, I personally in my daily basis development Fish shell is pretty neat and increases productivity in terminal. However I still use Bash in the server side where I need for example, explicit error aborting like `set -e` that Fish doesn't have yet. https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510
- Siecje 6y ago
  set -e is not great and is not recommended. http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105 http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105
  - joseluisq 6y ago
    Agree with the "false positives" however in combination with error handling I don't see why not use it.
  - _jal 6y ago
    -e is in the class of things that can be fine to use, but the people least-likely to be prepared to know when it can be are the most likely to expect it to behave better than it does. Sort of a combination finger-trap/cigar cutter for newbies.
    - joseluisq 6y ago
      Yeah.. but still useful despite the "false positives" that the link states which are addressable with proper error handling.
      - tadfisher 6y ago
        `-eu -o pipefail` catches most of what newcomers expect anyway.
  - rgoulter 6y ago
    I read this as "bash has unintuitive footguns" rather than "set -e has unintuitive footguns with its usage".
    - oblio 6y ago
      Bash doesn't have unintuitive footguns, bash <<is>> a unintuitive footgun :-)
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    I agree with the second to last recommendation: > rking's personal recommendation is to go ahead and use set -e, but beware of possible gotchas. It has useful semantics, so to exclude it from the toolbox is to give into FUD. Manual error handling would be ideal but it's too easy for me to mess up and miss something. Plus, if you really wanted to catch everything with proper error handling you would need to wrap every command in your script.
- giantandroids 6y ago
  if you use a bash shebang in your scripts, does it not matter (honest question, I never have used fish)?

Zhyl 6y ago

I'm surprised that Fish isn't used more for education. I don't know of any distros aimed at new users which have fish as the default. I don't think I've seen any tutorials that use fish to teach shell concepts. It seems like such a missed opportunity, especially at a time when Linux Gaming is on the rise. There's a whole audience that would have the activation energy of getting into shell scripting lowered by being slightly more friendly and approachable than bash. I feel like fish is the python of shells, and python has more than proved that a language being 'easy' and approachable makes it much more appealing to a wider audience.

hashkb 6y ago
Off topic: I came back to Python after a few years and WOW the LSP is fast and helpful. Maybe that's always been the case but after Typescript forced me to turn my vim into an IDE, Python really outshines it on the tooling. Edit: the point is that I should try fish too. Great user friendly tooling isn't just for beginners.
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patrickmcnamara 6y ago
This is probably due to the fact that fish isn't 100% POSIX compliant. A lot of commands new users see on the web won't work properly in fish shell. For example, you couldn't set environment variables for one command in fish like you could in other shells until the last minor version (3.1). I'm glad fish is becoming more like other more standard shells while maintaining its user-friendliness.
himujjal 6y ago
> I feel like fish is the python of shells There is actually python for shell. Check out https://xon.sh https://xon.sh
- kseistrup 6y ago
  And Marcel the Shell ⌘ https://www.marceltheshell.org/ https://www.marceltheshell.org/

awalGarg 6y ago

As someone with a teeny tiny commit in this release and a maintained personal fork, I feel compelled to say that the biggest benefit of fish over bash/zsh for me is not just the OOTB completions UX etc., but also how much more approachable it is to hacking. I would never even bother reading the source code of bash again, let alone try to patch it, because I have 0 confidence that something completely unrelated is not gonna break.

joseluisq 6y ago

Wow many improvements especially in the scripting. Definitely I will try it out. BTW I still waiting for https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/510 Congrats for the release!

bogdan 6y ago

Fish is my favourite shell because among other things, it has the best support for vi key bindings. I have been using the master version of it without any issues for more than half a year now for the undo / redo support and I'm glad the team has finally released it to stable. Thanks to everyone who worked on this! If anyone is reading this and is using vi mode with bash or zsh, give fish a try, it's so much better!

Erlangen 6y ago
> If anyone is reading this and is using vi mode with bash or zsh, give fish a try, it's so much better! Great to hear that. I am using vi key bindings wherever it's possible, for example, text editing, Firefox(vimium) and file manager(ranger). But I have never been able to figure out how to use vi mode effectively in the shell prompt. The last time since I tried vi mode in shell was at least 5 years ago. I could roughly remember that vi mode bindings conflicted with certain oh-my-fish plugins I had installed. Even worse factor was that, I didn't know how to do certain things in vi mode, for example "M-." key to yank last argument from previous command. So I gave it up in the end. Would you mind sharing what plugins do you use? And how do you work efficiently with vi mode? Thanks ahead.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  I’m a die-hard vim user and a fish developer but (gasp!) I don’t use vi mode in fish or any other shell. Alt-V will open $EDITOR with the command line contents preloaded into the buffer and update the prompt on exit, I find that to be good enough without the frustration of trying to convert the prompt into a text editor when it’s not.
  - cameroncairns 6y ago
    This alone might convince me to start using fish again. Thanks for the tip!
umanwizard 6y ago
That's odd. bash and zsh had leagues better vi bindings the last time I tried. fish had tons of weird errors, most notably that things like `d2w` simply don't work. I actually had to stop using fish and go back to zsh because I couldn't get past the lack of vi support. Apparently, https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/4019 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/4019 still has not been fixed. There's no similar issue in bash/zsh.

sdfjkl 6y ago

Fish is my shell of choice for a couple years now. Not because it's the perfect shell, but because it's a lot better than any other for interactive shells. For scripting I still stick to bash because it's more portable and I already know how to cope with its warts. And sometimes when I can't remember the fish syntax by heart, I just launch a bash from inside fish to run my command and then Ctrl-D :-)

ComputerGuru 6y ago
I switched to fish a very long time ago (2009 maybe?) because it started up so much faster than zsh w/ all the plugins that it took to get the fancy features fish had out of the box. Since then, fish has only become a lot faster as we have focused on performance and optimizations considerably.
- sdfjkl 6y ago
  I tried zsh after fish and my impression was somewhat like this: Okay, so I got to do a lot of customizing to get this to work nearly as well as fish does out of the box - can't be bothered!
  - jonfw 6y ago
    My impression of ZSH after fish is "ok this made for a really annoying couple of hours to set things up, but now I'll never have an incompatibility hassle again!" When I was in school and working on my own stuff I liked using fringe shells like xonsh and fish, but working in teams I feel like I need a pretty significant productivity increase to justify using a different tool than everybody else.
    - t0astbread 6y ago
      Unless you source a lot of shared scripts why would it matter what shell you use interactively? You can install fish and bash side by side and use one in your terminal and one for scripting.

mejutoco 6y ago

Fish is my shell of choice, like many in this thread. To me it just works, without configuring anything (ok, maybe a couple of aliases), with great defaults. As an example, type anything(for instance, '.conf') + up arrow, and there you see all the completions (for instance, 'less /etc/postgresql/10/main/pg_hba.conf' shows for me) based on the shell history. You can then cycle through them with up/down arrows. It is the same as ctrl+R in bash, but so discoverable and plain. I found tons of similar details in fish. Edit: typos

ducktective 6y ago
For this specific use-case, ctrl+R + fzf works nicely.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  We’ve added some improvements in this release that should make that a better experience by improving the performance of `history` when piped to fzf (or anything else). The output was previously buffered and GNU wide character comparison/conversion is insanely slow so that had to be hacked around.
lorenzfx 6y ago
It really is my pet peeve with fish, but the last command that started with what you typed cannot be completed that way. For that, you need to use right-arrow. I kept a fork of fish for that purpose for some time, but that was really too much hassle and I went back to zsh. Which is pretty sad, because otherwise fish is amazing.
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  ctrl + e or end will complete commands in that case
  - sixstringtheory 6y ago
    IIUC, right-arrow also does, and option-right-arrow will complete individual arguments from the last command one by one (macOS).

ducktective 6y ago

I always see these posts, get tempted to use fish instead of bash but then I ask the ubiquity question and end up saying "Not today..."

ComputerGuru 6y ago
The ubiquity question?
- ducktective 6y ago
  bash is installed by default on pretty much everything but for fish I need to un-learn bash shenanigans like `esac` which I fear would hurt more than help in general. Either that, or maybe I'm just lazy and missing out on a nice tool...
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    Fish made me write better bash scripts because it gave me a proper understanding of IFS, test, and other shell “basics” since it removes a layer of automagic by simplifying the syntax. Eg fish discourages the use of `if [` and it makes you realize that the bracket isn’t a grammatical construct but rather a terribly named command.
  - acdha 6y ago
    I switched entirely for interactive use a couple of years ago and have only had positive things to say. I still use Bash for scripts but that’s exclusively scripts which I edit in a real editor with version control, 100% shellcheck, etc. and even then I’ve been rewriting most non-trivial scripts into Python for the last decade so it gets sane error handling and data structures, not to mention usually ending up being shorter due to the richer library.
epicide 6y ago
If you mean for script portability: you can still easily call scripts with bash directly. For scripts that modify the environment, use bass. If you mean that you still have to use bash on other machines: yeah, I feel you there. At least for me, I'm fortunate that if I end up using a machine frequently, I can just install fish and add my config/dot files.

jorgebucaran 6y ago

Thank you Zanchey, Ridiculousfish, Fabian, and everyone else!

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago

I think Fish is an excellent interactive shell. I've still got Bash as my default shell for non-interactive sessions, but I configured Konsole to start Fish by default for interactive use (Settings->Command, set to the path to the fish executable). That way scripts that need Bash still work, but I get a sane environment for interaction. For "portable" scripts I write POSIX shell, C, or Python, depending on what I need to be portable to. fish_add_path will solve one of the few annoying things about Fish. I've been looking at trying Oil as a Bash replacement though, I think Oil for scripting + Fish for interaction might be a best-of-both-worlds setup.

ComputerGuru 6y ago
Fwiw fish_add_path doesn’t fundamentally change anything, users do get confused between global and universal variables and how they interact with exported variables like PATH, so this just makes it friendlier.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  It also helps prevent duplicate path entries. I'd written an "add_to_path_if_not_present" function, but "fish_add_path" should do the same thing. It's just convenience, but Fish is largely about convenience.
berlinquin 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. I have a debian box that I try keep as standard as possible, and I think this setup would fit my environment well.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Shebangs direct scripts to the right interpreter. Setting a default interactive shell won’t override it.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  True, but there do exist (crappy) scrips with incorrect shebangs. EG specifying `#!/bin/sh` when they should use `#!/usr/bin/env bash`, since `/bin/sh` isn't necessarily bash. Could be dash. Could be fish. Could be oil. Etc.)

mettamage 6y ago

I see a lot of enthusiasm for fish. Can someone point me to some resources that I can check? Not the best comparison but: vim has vimtutor, a couple of good vim games and so on. Is there anything for fish?

CGamesPlay 6y ago
Honestly, fish is really simple. Just fire it up! You definitely don't need a vimtutor equivalent, you probably won't customize anything beyond the prompt, and the syntax weirdness is pretty intuitive, but you can always use `help function` or whatever to get docs. Here's the docs if you do want to read about it first: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/ https://fishshell.com/docs/current/
groundCode 6y ago
Someone already mentioned the official docs. They’re good. I also enjoyed https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/23/the-fish-shell-is-awesome/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/23/the-fish-shell-is-awesome/ which is a nice read though not a tutorial.

dysoncdn 6y ago

>A new "fish_add_path" helper function to add paths to $PATH Yes! Modifying PATH has always been cumbersome compared to bash-like shells. This is a welcome addition.

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enriquto 6y ago

I'd like to use fish regularly, but I feel really attacked by the over-the-top usage of color and unrequested auto-completion. Even a "monochrome" theme I tried was shoveling many different shades of gray into my terminal. It does not seem to honor the NO_COLOR variable either. Is there any way to obtain a default configuration with everything disabled?

e_proxus 6y ago
It's a good point, but how many of the features are useful without any colors at all? At least the auto-completion would just look like any typed text. Perhaps fish is not for you?
- ludwigschubert 6y ago
  I think it’s a fair ask - imagine using fish on a monochrome screen, for example. I could imagine using underlines or inverse text frontage autocomplete in such a theme/mode. Let’s see if someone here already knows such a theme, or gets inspired to make one. ;-)
- enriquto 6y ago
  > Perhaps fish is not for you? It nearly is! I love fish powerful completion, just find it annoying that it is triggered automatically. Also fish syntax seems saner than bourne's, and I love it (but miss process substitution from time to time). Unfortunately, I cannot stand the flashiness. With some work, I have managed to disable all colors by setting a lot of fish_color variables in my configuration file. But the auto-completion drains me after a few minutes of use. As if you are speaking to somebody and they complete all your sentences! Even if the completion is correct, isn't that extremely annoying?
  - hibbelig 6y ago
    I think what you are talking about are the fish "suggestions". By default, that text is greyed out and if you like the suggestion, you can cursor-right (or ctrl-f) to accept it. But if you don't like the suggestion, you just keep typing. If my hunch (that you are talking about the suggestions) is correct, then perhaps it works to set it to white on white or black on black, or whatever matches your color scheme. It will still be there, but you won't see it :-). (But you would get it after cursor-right or end or ctrl-f or ctrl-e...)

xyst 6y ago

what's the difference between this and zsh? both seem to have the same set of features. also zsh is the default shell for macOS (as of Catalina)

jacobsenscott 6y ago
Fish has many more features out of box. To match fish with zsh you need to install many zsh plugins. Because the features are native to fish they are much faster in fish than zsh. Fish has a great help system and error messages. Fish is also a much cleaner programming language because it doesn't need to carry the historical quirks of bash, zsh, and posix. That said I wouldn't recommend using it as a programming language.

kbd 6y ago

Folks make a big deal about everything Fish gives you out of the box, but for someone who already has Zsh well–configured (eg. syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, fzf), can someone sell me on things I might be missing out on from Fish?

spamizbad 6y ago
Assuming zsh is already doing everything you want the biggest thing you're missing is speed.
- kbd 6y ago
  "Speed" seems a vague claim. What are you referring to? Startup time, interactive use, scripting?
- edoceo 6y ago
  WTF are you doing where shell "speed" is the bottleneck? How does it happen that your shell starts "slow". This post has lots of speed comments. I don't get it. Are bash pipes slower than others? Do folk have a shell that takes longer than 250ms to start?
  - anoki 6y ago
    I tried out many of the popular shells (bash, zsh, fish, etc) many years ago when my daily driver was an older thinkpad, and some of the startup times were painfully slow for me. It definitely drove me toward the more minimal shells like ksh and rc. On newer hardware it hasn't been noticeable, but it's real.
  - hjek 6y ago
    Not OP but fish's fuzzy autocomplete is snappy, especially on low-end hardware even when I mistype a lot, where zsh will often just freeze completely, for me at least.
duckerude 6y ago
Not having to fight against POSIX. Arrays are first-class, strings don't split when you don't want them to, things that could be builtins generally are builtins instead of inscrutable syntax. Command output is split on newlines, which turns out to work really well with most Unix tools and only breaks on the most pathological of filenames. The newbie-ism `for f in (ls)` isn't actually harmful in fish. Autocomplete definitions are very straightforward and declarative, so writing your own is easy. See https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/complete.html#example https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/complete.html#exampl.... zsh's system is more intimidating. (I even contributed completions for a few commands to this release of fish.)

acdha 6y ago

I put off switching from bash for years but quit cold turkey for fish a couple of years ago, and find myself appreciating that almost daily. One of the underappreciated values is that while you can configure it you get great functionality out of the box. Switching was chsh, picking a theme in the interactive config, and going back to work. The only I’ve really felt the need to do was to add the Terraform workspace to my prompt, which was quite easy.

kstrauser 6y ago
I made myself use Fish for a week as an experiment. Day one was a little rough. Day two was easier. On day three I decided to customize my prompt, and after seeing how trivially easy that was (you write a fish function called "fish_prompt" that uses shell commands to build your prompt) compared to Zsh or Bash, I was... hooked.
- acdha 6y ago
  I definitely built up the switching costs in my head based on past experience with zsh. Good defaults are easy to undervalue.

erichurkman 6y ago

The performance fix for macOS [0] is very welcomed. I'll be glad to get rid of the ugly hacks in my fish config files. Looks like an amazing release all around. [0] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/7365 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/7365

pcr910303 6y ago

I used to really use fish pervasively in my computer, but after a while I realized that I forgot literally all of bash (like I forgot how for-loops look like, how word split works…) and I just switched back to macOS default zsh. I’m still wanting a fish-alike interative shell that improves on the Bourne shell language (and bash extensions). I’m having hopes on Oil shell [0], but it’s still in an early stage so I guess I’ll have to wait for a far future… [0]: https://oilshell.org https://oilshell.org

ddeville 6y ago

> Significant performance improvements to completion of the available commands (#7153), especially on macOS Big Sur where there was a significant regression (#7365, #7511). This is buried down in the Completion section but this is a big deal if you’ve upgraded to MacOS Big Sur: completing a command could hang the shell for 10-15 seconds making it nearly unusable. Thanks for fixing this!

kstrauser 6y ago
This made my morning.

meddlepal 6y ago

I used fish for a couple years but switched back to zsh. I found the incompatibilities with bash/zsh to be annoying at times and finally just decided to do the "When in Rome do as the Romans" do thing and adopt zsh.

flohofwoe 6y ago
Same here. If you miss fish's smart auto-completion I can recommend this zsh plugin though: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
- apetrovic 6y ago
  Sadly, this plugin is a pale copy of fish's power - it isn't folder-aware (fish will offer different suggestions for different folders) and it isn't context aware (fish will try to autocomplete the current line based on the context of the current folder, zsh-autosuggestion will just blindly offer history line that starts with what's typed)
  - jonfw 6y ago
    I just use tab complete if I want a file from my working directory, which I actually prefer. If anybody else is using zsh-autosuggestions, it's really worth looking into configuring it rather than using it out of the box. It exposes some pretty cool options. It was sub-par out of box in comparison to fish, but after some tweaking I like it better. You can do things like ignore history based completions on certain commands (like git, I don't need my last commit message popping up)
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    zsh-autosuggestion definitely has per-folder suggestions, in normal day-to-day work I haven't seen a difference to fish so far (fish may have added features in the last two years that I'm not aware of, but the basic context-senstive suggestions are definitely supported).
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jacobsenscott 6y ago

Fish has saved me from so many hours of zsh yak shaving. It is the best.

ogre_codes 6y ago

Love fish, but I always add the Bob the Fish theme which adds a really nice Powerline command line theme which effectively shows me current git status with just enough info to be useful much of the time.

diegocg 6y ago

>undo is bound to Control+Z, and redo to Alt+/ Unfortunate choice of keys for redo IMO

duckerude 6y ago
Control+Y is already taken, and Control+Shift+Z is indistinguishable from Control+Z because of terminal limitations. So I can't think of anything better.
roryokane 6y ago
It's not totally arbitrary, at least. In Emacs, Alt+/ is bound to Undo/Redo by default.

rtkaratekid 6y ago

When in college my prof dared me to switch from bash to fish (because he thought it would be a funny failure) and I'm still using it today. It's a fantastic shell!

kderbyma 6y ago

I forked fish for fun into ghoti

synthc 6y ago

I love fish, and have been using it as my shell for over 10 years, it's pretty much the first thing I install on a new system. I usually heavily tweak the settings of the applications I use, make my own custom themes etc, but the defaults of fish are so good that I hardly changed anything. I only installed 3 plugins (z,fzf,and virtualfish) and that's it, it's super productive. Completion from history, persistently setting enviroment variables, defining functions, the syntax, everything is much more ergonomic and sane than in bash. I'm sure you can tweak zsh or even bash to achieve something similar, but why bother? Also, i don't mind the incompatibility with bash: the fish language is much more sane, and you can easily use bash if needed.

theshrike79 6y ago
This is the exact reason I use Fish. The only thing I _need_ to get installed on random servers is Fish itself. No need to install and configure oh-my-$shell or other huge monstrosities. Most of my stuff comes from a simple homeshick[1] sync with a few files in it. [1] https://github.com/andsens/homeshick https://github.com/andsens/homeshick
aembleton 6y ago
Thank you for this comment. I had never come across fzf Fish plugin until now: https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish So easy to use.

geoelectric 6y ago

I used fish shell for a lot of years. Ultimately, I got tired of having to translate snippets for my use and went back to zsh for the bash compatibility. Zsh becoming the Mac default also gave me an incentive, because I prefer to use system native if it's anywhere near up to date. But a lot of what I have to cobble together in zsh via antigen and omz was batteries-included or fisherman-easy in fish. It's very powerful right out of the box. I miss it all the time, and it may get me back before it's done.

triztian 6y ago
Same here, used it for about a year but ultimately had to switch to bash/zsh variants because of compat. Servers were always bash and I always had to translate my fish scripts to zsh/bash shell when collaborating with colleagues. I wish it'd be more popular and preinstalled on servers and macOS.

stunt 6y ago

My favorite Fish plugins: - jorgebucaran/fisher - Plugin manager - IlanCosman/tide - Nice prompt with git status - jorgebucaran/humantime.fish - Turn milliseconds into a human-readable string in Fish. - franciscolourenco/done - Automatically receive notifications when long processes finish. - laughedelic/pisces - Helps you to work with paired symbols like () and '' in the command line. - jethrokuan/fzf - To integrate fzf (junegunn/fzf)

dividedbyzero 6y ago
Seems like the author of jethrokuan/fzf sort of recommends using fzf.fish[1] if you don't need some of the features: > fzf.fish is a newer fzf plugin with very similar features. It lacks Tmux support and fzf tab completion, but includes functions for searching git log, git status, and browsing shell variables using fzf. Additionally, it is more likely to be maintained going forward. You can read more about the differences between it and this plugin in the README of fzf.fish here. From [1] (slightly condensed): > TLDR: choose fzf.fish over jethrokuan/fzf if you want faster, more efficient, code, code that is easier to debug if you encounter issues, a tool built on Unix philosophy, a plugin that is more likely to attract contributors because it is more maintainable and has CI, a plugin that will be more frequently updated by its author (Jethro no longer uses fish), features for searching git status, git log, and shell variables and you don't mind having to integrate fzf with Tmux yourself, which is easy to do, not having buggy fzf tab completion Seems like it can search git status/log as well. 1: https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish

mattgreenrocks 6y ago

Congrats on the release! Fish is a wonderful piece of software and keeps getting better. I don't miss zsh and the pages of configuration at all.

ElijahLynn 6y ago

Been using Fish for many years now, I love the abbreviations feature the most, as it auto expands and doesn't hide the magic!

ElijahLynn 6y ago

FINALLY!!!!!! A new "fish_add_path" helper function to add paths to $PATH without producing duplicates, to be used interactively or in config.fish (#6960, #7028). For example: fish_add_path /opt/mycoolthing/bin will add /opt/mycoolthing/bin to the beginning of $fish_user_path without creating duplicates, so it can be called safely from config.fish or interactively, and the path will just be there, once.

trymas 6y ago
YES. Just couple days ago I've mangled `config.fish` with wrong use of `$fish_user_path` and was wondering why my shell started throwing errors of `$PATH` being too long, which duplicated itself to infinity and beyond. That's what you get when you don't read the docs fully.

away_throw 6y ago

Probably my favorite feature with fish is the improved globs. I can do **.pdf to recursively get all pdfs or *{.flac,.mp3} to only get flac and mp3 files from a directory.

sontek 6y ago

I've been using fish for 3 months now after using Bash for 20. I'm probably going to switch back in the next few days. I LOVE fish but they went out of their way to not be compatible with Bash (like (pwd) instead of $(pwd) for expanding) that break a lot of existing scripts. The breaking point for me was when the rust/cargo env didn't work in it because they don't have compatible case statements.

mekster 6y ago
That is why I used fish only as a tool to write my own little scripts instead of using it as an interactive shell but not for the scripts that may be touched or used outside of me. Zsh with plenty of plugins makes it pretty convenient as a shell that is still compatible with most bash scripts.

PoignardAzur 6y ago

> A new special input function forward-single-char moves one character to the right, and if an autosuggestion is available, only take a single character from it (#7217, #4984). Huh. It feels super weird to see this finally hit release. Feels like a lifetime ago that I made this patch, I'd completely forgotten about it. Since then I've gone through another lockdown, quit my job, started a Rust GUI framework, and started doing self-employed consulting. Also it feels kind of humbling to think about the weeks I spent writing it, and then see that it's only a bullet point in a changelog that has hundreds of them (most of them a lot more useful than mine). Cheers to the fish community!

iamevn 6y ago

I absolutely love fish. Completions and colors and all that are nice but the killer feature for me is the scripting. I can actually throw a loop or a one-off function together for whatever random task I have and not have to worry about arcane syntax or weird gotchas. I used bash for years and anything that requires more than some pipes would either not get done or get done in a heavier-duty programming language. With fish things just made sense and I was immediately solving more complex problems at the shell.