6 ms·

I used to use fish, and emacs. But when I switched to vim, I had to switch away from fish as well because of its lack of vi bindings. It is a little disappointi

I used to use fish, and emacs. But when I switched to vim, I had to switch away from fish as well because of its lack of vi bindings. It is a little disappointing to go back to using bash, but as long as bash-completion is working, it's not really a big issue. Of course, I do miss the syntax highlighting. (I would use zsh, but it provides little benefit over bash out of the box and is slower (oh-my-zsh is unbearably slow to start, too).) There are a few things that, while I understand why fish is missing them, I wish would be added: - vi-mode, obviously - Control+R. It is annoying to have to guess how much you must type before hitting the up arrow, instead of having it dynamically displayed. Same goes for zsh vi-mode's ? command. - Well more of a removal, but the backslash in single-quoted strings. I'm used to typing '\', and that's not possible with fish. Additionally, to get one backslash in any sort of regex (sed, grep), you need four backslashes. - Goes without saying, but bash-completion. Fish's completion is mostly history-based, which is great for repeatedly running the same command, but terrible for discoverability - "$()" and any non-splitting command substitution. Currently, it is impossible to pass a multi-line string from a command substitution as a single argument. Which, it may be argued, should be done by piping, but sometimes it is useful to have stdin. - More extensibility in general. I'd like to be able to customize my shell just as much as I can customize my WM. Probably more. Honestly, it was easier to go back to using bash than I thought it would be -- it was almost a relief. fish just feels more polished and clean, especially with regard to escaping, but it misses some very important features. Edit: I heard that there is a vi-mode now. Sounds interesting, but I don't really feel like installing it at the moment, and if I ever try another shell it'll probably be zsh.

nextos 11y ago
I run zsh barebones, and I've never been able to get some tab completions to work on bash as well as in zsh. But it's probably possible. E.g. on some patterns involving *. Care to share your setup?
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  No, my bash is mostly the default that Debian provides (only semi-relevant option I have enabled is globstar, which is just the recursive globbing). I guess I didn't mean that zsh wasn't that much better, just that I didn't think it was that much better. I may switch to zsh eventually, but I just switched shells and I don't really want to do it again very soon.
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    Debian uses dash actually, not bash. I rather prefer it that way since dash is strictly POSIX compliant. Takes some of the tediousness out of creating portable shell scripts.
    - baghira 11y ago
      /bin/sh on debian is dash, but the default interactive shell is still bash (sorry for nitpicking).
    - thristian 11y ago
      Debian uses dash as /bin/sh, but newly-created accounts default to /bin/bash as their login shell.
eridius 11y ago
> vi-mode, obviously As you said at the end, Fish does have this. I don't know if it's full-featured enough for you though. > Control+R. It is annoying to have to guess how much you must type before hitting the up arrow, instead of having it dynamically displayed When you start typing a command-line in Fish that matches a previously-typed command, it automatically shows the rest of the line as an available completion, and pressing ^F or the right arrow will complete it for you. The lack of this functionality actually really kills my ability to use any other shell. > Currently, it is impossible to pass a multi-line string from a command substitution as a single argument Not actually true. If you set IFS to '' then that disables command substitution line splitting. That said, it is not well-known and is rather awkward. This is a known pain point with Fish today. > More extensibility in general. I'd like to be able to customize my shell just as much as I can customize my WM. Probably more. It's really hard to know what you're asking for here. What isn't extensible enough for you? What do you wish you could do that you can't?
- nkouevda 11y ago
  > When you start typing a command-line in Fish that matches a previously-typed command, it automatically shows the rest of the line as an available completion, and pressing ^F or the right arrow will complete it for you. ^R is more powerful, though; it matches at any point in previous commands, not just at the beginning. > The lack of this functionality actually really kills my ability to use any other shell. You can achieve that behavior in readline (which is used by bash, python shell, etc.) by changing the up/down arrows from previous-history/next-history to history-search-backward/history-search-forward. In ~/.inputrc: "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward Note that you can still use ^P/^N for previous-history/next-history (or you can remap "\C-p"/"\C-n" as well).
  - mintplant 11y ago
    > ^R is more powerful, though; it matches at any point in previous commands, not just at the beginning. That's how it works in Fish as well. user@system ~> echo wow wow user@system ~> echo something something user@system ~> wow█ ...press the up arrow and the current line becomes... user@system ~> echo wow█
hurin 11y ago
> Goes without saying, but bash-completion. Fish's completion is mostly history-based, which is great for repeatedly running the same command, but terrible for discoverability Fish has both kinds of completion. You can hit tab to get a list of possible completions (command-list based) if there is more than one, if there is only one possible command it will tab-complete. You can also customize this list.
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  It does, but bash-completion has a long list of supported commands. Not just git, but also modprobe, pygmentize, youtube-dl, even grub…
  - hurin 11y ago
    You can add/write your own completions for fish http://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html#completion http://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html#completion
pragone 11y ago
Someone's gotta explain to me how and why oh-my-zsh is slow. I've never once experienced it being slow for me. In fact, I switched to prezto and it was unbelievably slow. I switched back to oh-my-zsh. Maybe I'm just not using it right...
- tomphoolery 11y ago
  OMZ got painfully slow for me when I used it with a lot of plugins and it was iterating over a lot of different file paths. It seems like ZSH has an issue when you're loading a mass amount of files...or maybe it's just the way OMZ is loading them?
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    Are you on a mac by chance? I ran into a really weird problem on OSX, still happens as of the latest Yosemite beta, where if you have a lot of system logs laying around, the shell takes an inordinately long time to start (10+ seconds) and do autocompletes. If you clear out your logfiles by trashing /private/var/log/asl/*.asl, there's a pretty decent speedup.
    - ridiculous_fish 11y ago
      A permanent fix for this is to create a file called .hushlogin in your home directory. I do it on all my machines.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        That totally works - thanks for the hint! Do you have any insight as to why this happens? It smells like some kind of log parsing to present messages on login, but I've never received any such messages, and a quick vgrep of the various profile/rc's never turned anything up.
tomphoolery 11y ago
ZSH only gets slow because of the customizations, which would be true in Bash as well. Both shells are relatively comparable, though there are still a few things you can do in ZSH that you can't do in Bash. If you keep your customizations relatively light-weight and don't iterate over too many files on each login session, you'll probably be OK. I wrote a framework to help deal with the shell a little bit after getting fed up with OMZ's slowness: https://github.com/tubbo/homer https://github.com/tubbo/homer
VieElm 11y ago
> I had to switch away from fish as well because of its lack of vi bindings. No you didn't. I use vim and fish just fine. Just put this in your .vimrc: set shell=/bin/bash
thaumasiotes 11y ago
> I'm used to typing '\', and that's not possible with fish. Additionally, to get one backslash in any sort of regex (sed, grep), you need four backslashes. This is a piece of technology we used to have and then somehow lost. Common Lisp uses ~ as the control character for format strings. C uses \ as the control charcter for raw strings, and % as the control character for format strings. HTML uses &. But regexps use \. JSON uses \. And JSON is a new format! \ was literally the worst possible choice. As soon as you have multiple formats sharing a control character, you start to need huge power-of-two runs of it in order to say what you mean. Who thought it was a good idea to reuse control characters? \ is used in raw string definitions. It should not be used in any other format, if strings might be used to invoke that format. This is a clear case where every standard doing its own unique thing is the correct approach, but we seem to be moving in the other direction.
apetrovic 11y ago
> - Control+R. It is annoying to have to guess how much you must type before hitting the up arrow, instead of having it dynamically displayed It's not anyone's cup of tea, but I'm using percol to get similar functionality: (taken from oh-my-fish) * pip install percol * make a function like this: function percol_select_history history|percol|read foo if [ $foo ] commandline $foo else commandline '' end end * bind new function to Ctrl+r: function fish_user_key_bindings bind \cr percol_select_history end ... and you'll have a searchable history list. To me, together with fish's command completion, it's more powerful than ctrl+r in bash/zsh.
oahziur 11y ago
I really miss Control+R when I use fish. I also prefer to click Control+R again instead of using the inconvenient up arrow key to search the history.

nextos 11y ago

I run zsh barebones, and I've never been able to get some tab completions to work on bash as well as in zsh. But it's probably possible. E.g. on some patterns involving *. Care to share your setup?

0942v8653 11y ago
No, my bash is mostly the default that Debian provides (only semi-relevant option I have enabled is globstar, which is just the recursive globbing). I guess I didn't mean that zsh wasn't that much better, just that I didn't think it was that much better. I may switch to zsh eventually, but I just switched shells and I don't really want to do it again very soon.
- juliangregorian 11y ago
  Debian uses dash actually, not bash. I rather prefer it that way since dash is strictly POSIX compliant. Takes some of the tediousness out of creating portable shell scripts.
  - baghira 11y ago
    /bin/sh on debian is dash, but the default interactive shell is still bash (sorry for nitpicking).
  - thristian 11y ago
    Debian uses dash as /bin/sh, but newly-created accounts default to /bin/bash as their login shell.

eridius 11y ago

> vi-mode, obviously As you said at the end, Fish does have this. I don't know if it's full-featured enough for you though. > Control+R. It is annoying to have to guess how much you must type before hitting the up arrow, instead of having it dynamically displayed When you start typing a command-line in Fish that matches a previously-typed command, it automatically shows the rest of the line as an available completion, and pressing ^F or the right arrow will complete it for you. The lack of this functionality actually really kills my ability to use any other shell. > Currently, it is impossible to pass a multi-line string from a command substitution as a single argument Not actually true. If you set IFS to '' then that disables command substitution line splitting. That said, it is not well-known and is rather awkward. This is a known pain point with Fish today. > More extensibility in general. I'd like to be able to customize my shell just as much as I can customize my WM. Probably more. It's really hard to know what you're asking for here. What isn't extensible enough for you? What do you wish you could do that you can't?

nkouevda 11y ago
> When you start typing a command-line in Fish that matches a previously-typed command, it automatically shows the rest of the line as an available completion, and pressing ^F or the right arrow will complete it for you. ^R is more powerful, though; it matches at any point in previous commands, not just at the beginning. > The lack of this functionality actually really kills my ability to use any other shell. You can achieve that behavior in readline (which is used by bash, python shell, etc.) by changing the up/down arrows from previous-history/next-history to history-search-backward/history-search-forward. In ~/.inputrc: "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward Note that you can still use ^P/^N for previous-history/next-history (or you can remap "\C-p"/"\C-n" as well).
- mintplant 11y ago
  > ^R is more powerful, though; it matches at any point in previous commands, not just at the beginning. That's how it works in Fish as well. user@system ~> echo wow wow user@system ~> echo something something user@system ~> wow█ ...press the up arrow and the current line becomes... user@system ~> echo wow█

hurin 11y ago

> Goes without saying, but bash-completion. Fish's completion is mostly history-based, which is great for repeatedly running the same command, but terrible for discoverability Fish has both kinds of completion. You can hit tab to get a list of possible completions (command-list based) if there is more than one, if there is only one possible command it will tab-complete. You can also customize this list.

0942v8653 11y ago
It does, but bash-completion has a long list of supported commands. Not just git, but also modprobe, pygmentize, youtube-dl, even grub…
- hurin 11y ago
  You can add/write your own completions for fish http://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html#completion http://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html#completion

pragone 11y ago

Someone's gotta explain to me how and why oh-my-zsh is slow. I've never once experienced it being slow for me. In fact, I switched to prezto and it was unbelievably slow. I switched back to oh-my-zsh. Maybe I'm just not using it right...

tomphoolery 11y ago
OMZ got painfully slow for me when I used it with a lot of plugins and it was iterating over a lot of different file paths. It seems like ZSH has an issue when you're loading a mass amount of files...or maybe it's just the way OMZ is loading them?
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Are you on a mac by chance? I ran into a really weird problem on OSX, still happens as of the latest Yosemite beta, where if you have a lot of system logs laying around, the shell takes an inordinately long time to start (10+ seconds) and do autocompletes. If you clear out your logfiles by trashing /private/var/log/asl/*.asl, there's a pretty decent speedup.
  - ridiculous_fish 11y ago
    A permanent fix for this is to create a file called .hushlogin in your home directory. I do it on all my machines.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      That totally works - thanks for the hint! Do you have any insight as to why this happens? It smells like some kind of log parsing to present messages on login, but I've never received any such messages, and a quick vgrep of the various profile/rc's never turned anything up.

tomphoolery 11y ago

ZSH only gets slow because of the customizations, which would be true in Bash as well. Both shells are relatively comparable, though there are still a few things you can do in ZSH that you can't do in Bash. If you keep your customizations relatively light-weight and don't iterate over too many files on each login session, you'll probably be OK. I wrote a framework to help deal with the shell a little bit after getting fed up with OMZ's slowness: https://github.com/tubbo/homer https://github.com/tubbo/homer

VieElm 11y ago

> I had to switch away from fish as well because of its lack of vi bindings. No you didn't. I use vim and fish just fine. Just put this in your .vimrc: set shell=/bin/bash

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> I'm used to typing '\', and that's not possible with fish. Additionally, to get one backslash in any sort of regex (sed, grep), you need four backslashes. This is a piece of technology we used to have and then somehow lost. Common Lisp uses ~ as the control character for format strings. C uses \ as the control charcter for raw strings, and % as the control character for format strings. HTML uses &. But regexps use \. JSON uses \. And JSON is a new format! \ was literally the worst possible choice. As soon as you have multiple formats sharing a control character, you start to need huge power-of-two runs of it in order to say what you mean. Who thought it was a good idea to reuse control characters? \ is used in raw string definitions. It should not be used in any other format, if strings might be used to invoke that format. This is a clear case where every standard doing its own unique thing is the correct approach, but we seem to be moving in the other direction.

apetrovic 11y ago

> - Control+R. It is annoying to have to guess how much you must type before hitting the up arrow, instead of having it dynamically displayed It's not anyone's cup of tea, but I'm using percol to get similar functionality: (taken from oh-my-fish) * pip install percol * make a function like this: function percol_select_history history|percol|read foo if [ $foo ] commandline $foo else commandline '' end end * bind new function to Ctrl+r: function fish_user_key_bindings bind \cr percol_select_history end ... and you'll have a searchable history list. To me, together with fish's command completion, it's more powerful than ctrl+r in bash/zsh.

oahziur 11y ago

I really miss Control+R when I use fish. I also prefer to click Control+R again instead of using the inconvenient up arrow key to search the history.