4 ms·

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

by 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.
      - dividedbyzero 6y ago
        There are even things like bass and replay.fish to deal with sourcing bash scripts
      - jonfw 6y ago
        I share a lot of snippets and commands with members of the team, write a lot of bash (which I like to debug in interactive mode), and often follow or produce documented procedures in interactive shell (not quite repetitive enough or frequent enough to bother scripting).
    - babaganoosh89 6y ago
      I felt that way until setting up a new computer, then I don't bother and install Fish and move on.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Omz plugins are the worst thing to happen to zsh, only surpassed by nvm. Omz has so much compatibility code that you end up with way more than you need and a lot of what it ads can be shimmed to lazy load. Nvm is just fucking trash. I had to rewrite large parts of it to not be total garbage. It still is. Go look at how it's installed and how it loads itself its fuckin insane.
junon 6y ago
Same here. Fish makes certain things easier (working with variables, for example) but sometimes I still drop a bash shell.
omginternets 6y ago
I'd just like to add that if you're considering the switch but are worried about compatibility with bash, things have gotten better. I wouldn't call it outright compatible, but the most problematic differences in syntax (e.g. the absence of &&) went away a few years ago. If it didn't quite stick the first time, I think it's worth trying again.
- jonfw 6y ago
  The parsing and setting of environment variables was always my #1 hassle with fish. I feel like I see a lot of BASH snippets that get copy pasted around that I always had to re-write or throw in a sub shell. Particularly annoying when you're trying to do something while screen sharing and somebody gives you a snippet which you have to re-write before using it- "Oh yeah it's a hassle but I've got sweet auto-complete" gets old
  - mhink 6y ago
    IMO, copy-and-pasting bash commands is an organizational smell to begin with, but I don't think this particular use case is a reason not to use one shell over another. If you do have a snippet of bash to run, it's easy enough to toss it in a file (with a shebang) and run it as a shell script. And as a bonus, it's reusable and you can add comments/notes for when you have to run it again.
    - omginternets 6y ago
      I think the bigger issue is with programs (e.g. nvm) that are either implemented as collections of shell scripts, or function by dynamically generating shell commands.
    - jonfw 6y ago
      > IMO, copy-and-pasting bash commands is an organizational smell to begin with The people who develop the automation have to start somewhere :). If you're standing up a test environment or a PoC, writing down commands get's you 80% of the way to reproducing your results
  - 6y ago

by sdfjkl 6y ago

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.
    - dividedbyzero 6y ago
      There are even things like bass and replay.fish to deal with sourcing bash scripts
    - jonfw 6y ago
      I share a lot of snippets and commands with members of the team, write a lot of bash (which I like to debug in interactive mode), and often follow or produce documented procedures in interactive shell (not quite repetitive enough or frequent enough to bother scripting).
  - babaganoosh89 6y ago
    I felt that way until setting up a new computer, then I don't bother and install Fish and move on.
waheoo 6y ago
Omz plugins are the worst thing to happen to zsh, only surpassed by nvm. Omz has so much compatibility code that you end up with way more than you need and a lot of what it ads can be shimmed to lazy load. Nvm is just fucking trash. I had to rewrite large parts of it to not be total garbage. It still is. Go look at how it's installed and how it loads itself its fuckin insane.

junon 6y ago

Same here. Fish makes certain things easier (working with variables, for example) but sometimes I still drop a bash shell.

omginternets 6y ago

I'd just like to add that if you're considering the switch but are worried about compatibility with bash, things have gotten better. I wouldn't call it outright compatible, but the most problematic differences in syntax (e.g. the absence of &&) went away a few years ago. If it didn't quite stick the first time, I think it's worth trying again.

jonfw 6y ago
The parsing and setting of environment variables was always my #1 hassle with fish. I feel like I see a lot of BASH snippets that get copy pasted around that I always had to re-write or throw in a sub shell. Particularly annoying when you're trying to do something while screen sharing and somebody gives you a snippet which you have to re-write before using it- "Oh yeah it's a hassle but I've got sweet auto-complete" gets old
- mhink 6y ago
  IMO, copy-and-pasting bash commands is an organizational smell to begin with, but I don't think this particular use case is a reason not to use one shell over another. If you do have a snippet of bash to run, it's easy enough to toss it in a file (with a shebang) and run it as a shell script. And as a bonus, it's reusable and you can add comments/notes for when you have to run it again.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    I think the bigger issue is with programs (e.g. nvm) that are either implemented as collections of shell scripts, or function by dynamically generating shell commands.
  - jonfw 6y ago
    > IMO, copy-and-pasting bash commands is an organizational smell to begin with The people who develop the automation have to start somewhere :). If you're standing up a test environment or a PoC, writing down commands get's you 80% of the way to reproducing your results
- 6y ago