I use the fish shell and have for several years now. A few years back I did a startup with a friend -- a cross platform mobile product but with a mess of compl

I use the fish shell and have for several years now. A few years back I did a startup with a friend -- a cross platform mobile product but with a mess of complex open-source c++ dependencies (which we forked and customized often) -- and we made the decision as we hired developers to over-specify some aspects of the machine environment to make it as easy as possible to share our development workflows. Note that "development workflow" is much more than just "i can run the app in docker" -- but rightfully includes -- I can efficiently run things in debugger, I can run the performance profiling tools in realistic ways, I can quickly execute and test a change someone else is trying to make, I can quickly share a change I'm making with someone else and be confident they can make realistic observations about it, i can setup a fast repro loop for some specific bug or feature ... etc. We did a pretty good job of getting the know now needed for all those workflows distributed across the team reliably with low effort despite some complicated and weird build system requirements associated with our dependencies. One of the big bang for buck tricks that helped more than I would've expected was to mandate that everyone had to use fish shell. This really reduces the number of weird effects from random things that people copy/paste into their bash initialization -- with the developer never imagining the strange knock off effects that will one day cause a tool they don't understand to behave in a flaky way for a reason they will never figure out ... The amount of terrible things that developers randomly accumulate in their bash initialization probably can't be underestimated ... there's probably more risk of "weird problems" associated with advice on stack overflow related to bash initialization than maybe any other topic ... So I personally think standardizing a team or startup on an alt shell can be a potentially good idea ... As another point of evidence -- I later headed devops at another startup that took opposite perspective -- "use your own machine and your machine can be configured however you want and you just have to figure out dev workflows on your own" and it was extremely difficult to share knowledge about how to accomplish a lot of these basic workflows ... doing anything beyond the most basic ways of interacting with the codebase often involved a rather large amount of hands on dev machine troubleshooting (can you send me your .bashrc and .profile and .bash_profile? ok type these commands ... ok now you can grab my branch and try this to have a look at the thing i'm trying to change ...) fish is reliable and stable though -- I'm not sure about using a shell that's not been around for awhile in this way ... but I'd support it I think if I already had personal experience that the shell was "reliable enough" ...