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I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because

• junek 2y ago
  I know it's a typo but this: > what more could a shell? Is quite good. It could almost be the tag line for fish shell.
• ramon156 2y ago
  We had the exact same experience, still in love with fish!
• giancarlostoro 2y ago
  My only issue with Fish is when pasting things from the web that assume Bash, a lot of the time it just works, then now and then I get screwed. I don't know nearly enough Fish or Bash to switch. Still though, I prefer Fish ultimately.
  • mplanchard 2y ago
    It’s interesting how many folks in the comments have essentially this complaint, of not being able to paste bash from the internet. I just run `bash`, paste the thing, and then exit bash.
  • mekster 2y ago
    People don't realize they don't have to stick to a single shell for both scripting and terminal use. I use zsh with plugins which pretty much makes it act like fish's convenience but one can use fish as their shell scripting while keeping the "bash" compatibility by keep using zsh or bash under terminal.
• BeetleB 2y ago
  Also, do consider xonsh.[1] It's a Bash-like shell written in Python. It has significant overlap with the awesomeness of fish, and has the advantage of being able to write your shell scripts in a Python dialect. So if you know Python, the mental burden is much lower. On top of that, it's cross platform, since Python is. No WSL needed. I switched to it in 2018 and haven't looked back. Originally it was just because I wanted a better command prompt environment in Windows for work, but I liked it so much I switched to it in Linux as well. (And yes, you can type any Python statement right in the command prompt). [1] https://xon.sh/ https://xon.sh/
• pzmarzly 2y ago
  Interesting, I went the other way about 7 years ago - switched from fish to zsh (initially with oh-my-zsh). The interactive experience was similar enough on both shells, and the performance was great on fish and okay-ish on zsh, but two things won me over: 1. With zsh, I can copy-paste some bash snippet and in 99% of cases it will just work. Aside of copy-pasting from StackExchange, I also know a lot of bash syntax by heart by now, and can write some clever one-liners. With zsh, I didn't need to learn everything from scratch. (I guess this matters less now that you can ask AI to convert a bash one-liner into fish one-liner?) 2. For standalone scripts... well, I think it's best to reach for a proper programming language (e.g. Python) instead of any shell language, but if I had to use one, I would pick bash. Sure, it has many footguns, but I know them pretty well. And fish language is also not ideal - e.g. IIRC it doesn't have an equivalent of `set -e`, you have to add `; or return 1` to each line.
  • kadoban 2y ago
    > 2. For standalone scripts... well, I think it's best to reach for a proper programming language (e.g. Python) instead of any shell language, but if I had to use one, I would pick bash. Sure, it has many footguns, but I know them pretty well. And fish language is also not ideal - e.g. IIRC it doesn't have an equivalent of `set -e`, you have to add `; or return 1` to each line. I'm sure you know this, but: no particular reason the interactive shell you use has to match the shell you use for scripts. All of my scripts are in bash, but I haven't used bash interactively in decades now, at least on purpose.
    • johnthuss 2y ago
      I write all my scripts with the hash bang as "#! /bin/bash" so even though fish is my interactive shell, I still use bash for all shell scripts. I think the restrictions you mention only apply if you use "#! /bin/sh" rather than bash specifically.
      • ComputerGuru 2y ago
        Just fyi, you should use `#!/usr/bin/env bash` instead of `#!/bin/bash` or whatever because you can't assume the location of bash (but the location of `env` is indeed portably fixed). e.g. FreeBSD (and macOS?) has bash at `/usr/local/bin/bash`
• bravura 2y ago
  Do you mind sharing what you think are the killer features of fish?
  • mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    Being able to avoid OMZ and entire cargo cult of zsh configuration performance “hacks” that litter the internet. Really, not needing to pull in other people’s janky scripts because the built-in features work well is huge. I still configure fish and use a few scripts, but it’s the lack of the massive cottage industry that is the primary draw for me. Of course, many devs see that as a failing: “how could a shell do its job well without a thousand knobs to tweak?”
  • chabons 2y ago
    For me, it's that the ergonomics are straightforward, and everything works out of the box. If I find myself on a new machine, just installing fish gives me an ergonomic setup without having to install too many additional tools or mess with configuration.
    • HKH2 2y ago
      Also, fish_config is there if you want to make quick changes without having to look up syntax.
  • matthewmc3 2y ago
    Fish has a lot of features out of the box I find really useful: * Command auto suggestions as you type based on your history * History search (using up arrow) based on a partial command * Helpful completions and descriptions when you hit TAB * Muti-line command editing * Syntax highlighting You can get all those same features in Zsh by using plugins, but those features work out-of-the-box with Fish with zero configuration. Zsh is a bit of a pain to configure, and pretty anemic without plugins. Fish makes configuration optional because it works how you'd hope your shell would out of the box. Even though Zsh has those features as plugins, they're kinda janky, not well maintained, and often conflict with other plugins. Additionally, Fish also has: * Excellent built in commands (string, math, argparse) * Sane scripting (word parsing where you don't need to quote everything, etc) * Great documentation * A web-based configuration if you're into that sort of thing (it's a bit of a gimmick for beginners) The main reason I use Zsh (or Bash) at all is for POSIX/portability, or for when I can't install something else. But for an interactive shell on a machine I control, it's hard to compete with Fish for speed, features, and ease of use.
• thayne 2y ago
  I went bash -> fish -> zsh. The main reason I switched is because zsh can (often) source bash scripts and can use bash completion scripts (usually), and I was tired of having to translate things from bash to fish. I also ran into a few things where something that was relatively easy to do in bash was impossible to do with fish. But that was years ago so maybe that is less of an issue now, and I don't remember exactly what it was. Having used zsh, I think a big advantage it has over fish is the completions. There are completions available for more programs for zsh, and the zsh completions are sometimes higher quality in zsh. But I do generally like the syntax, and good out of the box experience of fish. I wish it had a bash or even posix compatibility mode and more available completions.
  • izietto 2y ago
    I can relate with your comment a few years ago, but later the situation drastically got better, while not perfect yet (i.e. I still need a custom autocomplete function for aws). You might want to give it a try now anyway.
  • mplanchard 2y ago
    I used bash for ages, and never really saw what zsh offered in comparison: I would have had to customize it almost as much as bash, and it didn’t really give me anything new. Fish was so much better than either out of the box, and I still have done virtually no configuration other than setting it up to use my common starship prompt, which is supported in bash as well. I don’t understand personally the argument about not having bash syntax. If I want it, I just run `bash`.
    • lucasoshiro 2y ago
      > I don’t understand personally the argument about not having bash syntax. Three main reasons: 1. The Fish language is only useful only for somehow extend fish itself, so it is pointless to spend time learning and practicing it unless I'm writing something for me or other Fish users. 2. Sometimes we need to copy and paste something to our shell. When using Fish I must remember to set variables with set, get the status code with $status instead of $?, use () instead of $() and so on, which is a unnecessary overhead 3. Bash's syntax is a hell: sometimes we forget a space, an escape, use end or done when we need to use fi or esac and so on. I don't trust my Bash code, I type everything in the terminal to check if everything is ok. In Fish I just can't do that... > If I want it, I just run `bash` That's what I do for 2 and 3. But when I do that I don't have the nice features of Fish... I still love Fish, though.
• kstrauser 2y ago
  Same here. I used it for about 3 days before I installed it on all my systems and permanently switched. For me, it was like the first time I learned a non-Latin language, and my eyes were opened to how much stuff I took for granted was completely arbitrary. For example, here's how you write an autoloaded function "foo" in Fish: you make a file called "foo.fish" in its config directory. Inside that, you write "function foo ..." to implement it. There's no step 3. That's it. Want to customize your shell prompt? Follow the process above to write a function called "fish_prompt" that uses normal scripting things like echo, pwd, git, or whatever to write your prompt to the screen. There's no step 2. That's it. Fish was revelatory. Other shells of the same vintage feel hopelessly outdated to me now. For context, I was the maintainer of FreeBSD's "bash-completion" port for a few years way back when. It's not that I don't have experience with other shells. I have plenty. I just don't want to use any of the others now.
  • sundarurfriend 2y ago
    This was more convincing to me than the GP comment, especially the shell prompt part.
  • coffeeindex 2y ago
    Is the “foo.fish” name required? Could I have “bar.fish” with “function foo…” inside and still autoload function foo?
    • ComputerGuru 2y ago
      Not autoload, no. You can have as many functions as you want in a single .fish file, but it'll only be lazily autoloaded if it has the same name as the command you are trying to execute. It's how we avoid doing the I/O of scanning all fish directories and parsing their contents at startup.
      • PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        ...and you can still explicitly source the files if you want to load the functions elsewhere.