5 ms·

I definitely recommend fish to every newcomer to Unix. It has sane defaults, colorful output, and so many features that work out of the box. That said, there i

by barosl 11y ago

I definitely recommend fish to every newcomer to Unix. It has sane defaults, colorful output, and so many features that work out of the box. That said, there is a long-standing issue regarding inline environment variables.[1] Briefly speaking, fish does not recognize the `NAME=value command` form. So you should use `env` to work around this. This may not be a deal breaker, but I'm a bit annoyed, and migrated to zsh. I would call zsh the opposite to fish. It has insane defaults, is highly customizable, and has so many features that are initially disabled. After hours of configuring it, I loved it.[2] Since then whenever I set up a new Unix machine zsh has been the first thing to install. So, I would recommend zsh for the people who are used to Unix. If not, or you don't bother to customize it, there's always fish. There is no place for bash. [1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/438 https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/438 [2] https://github.com/barosl/baroslized-settings/blob/master/.zshrc https://github.com/barosl/baroslized-settings/blob/master/.z...

nilved 11y ago
Using `env` is very much a feature, not a bug. It's part of fish's philosophy to use programs rather than builtins wherever possible. It's good practice to use `env` even when using other shells.
ddoolin 11y ago
Just to add to the first line, it also seems fairly well-commented in the code, at least the couple pieces I've looked at. This is really good for me as I often check the source first and helpful (or any) commenting is quite rare.
themodelplumber 11y ago
Fish is great. I used it for a couple of years, right up until I had to install a software system that made extensive use of bash scripts that were incompatible with it. At the time I was in too much of a hurry to figure out how to tell the software to explicitly use bash, or something along those lines.
- eridius 11y ago
  Why would a software system that relies on bash not explicitly use bash for its scripts?
  - nilved 11y ago
    Bad developers. For example, I used Arch Linux for a number of years, where `/bin/sh` is a symlink to bash. Switching that to point to `dash` broke a number of programs both in the official repositories and the AUR. A lot of shell scripters can't spot a bashism, and just as many don't know that other shell syntax even exists.
    - eridius 11y ago
      That's a different problem, though. /bin/sh must point to a sh-compatible shell. fish is not a sh-compatible shell. Therefore, any script using /bin/sh will never attempt to run as fish (as /bin/sh will never point to fish). The reason I'm having a hard time imagining how a scripting system that relies on bash would fail with fish is because I can't imagine how one would actually write a script that is executed with the user's login shell. There's no #! line that would do that by accident.
      - rquirk 11y ago
        There's just one scenario: a completely absent #! line. It's an easy fix, just add the line, otherwise 0755 scripts with no #! do execute using the current shell.
        eridius 11y ago
        That doesn't work for me (in Fish). > cat foo echo wat > ./foo Failed to execute process './foo'. Reason: exec: Exec format error The file './foo' is marked as an executable but could not be run by the operating system. It does however work in Bash. So this appears to be a bash-ism, rather than an OS feature.
AceJohnny2 11y ago
> It has insane defaults, is highly customizable, and has so many features that are initially disabled. Ah yes, the Emacs and Vim school of configuration.
diminishedprime 11y ago
>There is no place for bash. Just curious, why do you say this? I've used bash for years for basic command line things and now it sounds like I've been missing out on great features that other shells have.
- barosl 11y ago
  Sorry if my words were too strong. I said that because I like tools that do a particular job well. bash might be a middle ground tool that has moderately sane defaults and features. However, in other words, bash is inferior to fish with regard to easiness, and is worse than zsh with regard to feature set. I'm not a fan of such a tool. I believe the world could have been a better place if they adopted fish as a default shell.
  - diminishedprime 11y ago
    Interesting. I'll have to give both of those a try.

by barosl 11y ago

nilved 11y ago

Using `env` is very much a feature, not a bug. It's part of fish's philosophy to use programs rather than builtins wherever possible. It's good practice to use `env` even when using other shells.

ddoolin 11y ago

Just to add to the first line, it also seems fairly well-commented in the code, at least the couple pieces I've looked at. This is really good for me as I often check the source first and helpful (or any) commenting is quite rare.

themodelplumber 11y ago

Fish is great. I used it for a couple of years, right up until I had to install a software system that made extensive use of bash scripts that were incompatible with it. At the time I was in too much of a hurry to figure out how to tell the software to explicitly use bash, or something along those lines.

eridius 11y ago
Why would a software system that relies on bash not explicitly use bash for its scripts?
- nilved 11y ago
  Bad developers. For example, I used Arch Linux for a number of years, where `/bin/sh` is a symlink to bash. Switching that to point to `dash` broke a number of programs both in the official repositories and the AUR. A lot of shell scripters can't spot a bashism, and just as many don't know that other shell syntax even exists.
  - eridius 11y ago
    That's a different problem, though. /bin/sh must point to a sh-compatible shell. fish is not a sh-compatible shell. Therefore, any script using /bin/sh will never attempt to run as fish (as /bin/sh will never point to fish). The reason I'm having a hard time imagining how a scripting system that relies on bash would fail with fish is because I can't imagine how one would actually write a script that is executed with the user's login shell. There's no #! line that would do that by accident.
    - rquirk 11y ago
      There's just one scenario: a completely absent #! line. It's an easy fix, just add the line, otherwise 0755 scripts with no #! do execute using the current shell.
      - eridius 11y ago
        That doesn't work for me (in Fish). > cat foo echo wat > ./foo Failed to execute process './foo'. Reason: exec: Exec format error The file './foo' is marked as an executable but could not be run by the operating system. It does however work in Bash. So this appears to be a bash-ism, rather than an OS feature.

AceJohnny2 11y ago

> It has insane defaults, is highly customizable, and has so many features that are initially disabled. Ah yes, the Emacs and Vim school of configuration.

diminishedprime 11y ago

>There is no place for bash. Just curious, why do you say this? I've used bash for years for basic command line things and now it sounds like I've been missing out on great features that other shells have.

barosl 11y ago
Sorry if my words were too strong. I said that because I like tools that do a particular job well. bash might be a middle ground tool that has moderately sane defaults and features. However, in other words, bash is inferior to fish with regard to easiness, and is worse than zsh with regard to feature set. I'm not a fan of such a tool. I believe the world could have been a better place if they adopted fish as a default shell.
- diminishedprime 11y ago
  Interesting. I'll have to give both of those a try.