The fish shell is amazing • Hacker News Board

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#81

Post by desireco42 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

It is typical HN that everyone is talking about Zsh and how it isn't so bad. And you know what, I used it for a while long time ago, and it is great. I even had config I could transport to another machine when I need.

All that can't be compared with fish out of the box, which is why I am using fish, it will be 10 or so years now. When I say use, I mean that, I just use it, I don't spend time learning it's obscure features, creating scripts etc, no, just use it.

I have alias list that I use to make myself productive and it goes along with me to a new machine. Very slim and simple configuration. That and Vim, but that is another story.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#82

Post by pxc » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

ghostly_s wrote: post #68

legutierr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent demo of Nushell given a couple of weeks ago: https://media.handmade-seattle.com/nushell/

Oh wow...finally someone is bringing the great ideas of Powershell to unix. Can't wait to see how this turns out.

You can run PowerShell on Unix already, but imo it is too slow for interactive use. Getting it to act like a Fish makes it very, very slow

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#83

Post by michaelcampbell » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

ghostly_s wrote: post #68

legutierr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent demo of Nushell given a couple of weeks ago: https://media.handmade-seattle.com/nushell/

Oh wow...finally someone is bringing the great ideas of Powershell to unix. Can't wait to see how this turns out.

> great ideas of Powershell to unix

Now-If-They-Could-Improve the Syntax To-Make-It-Usable.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#84

Post by pxc » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #76

Ok, let's do this. Past related threads: Fish shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27180420 - May 2021 (118 comments) Fish Shell 3.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26302678 - March 2021 (128 comments) Fish is not operational on a VT220 terminal (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526237 - Dec 2020 (113 comments) New Features in the Fish Shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24631138…

Fish is wonderful! I'm glad it gets this repeated attention :D

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#85

Post by err4nt » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

I've been happy with Fish shell for years!

Yes, I could fiddle and twiddle with settings and configure a nicer shell, but Fish on its default settings on any OS just makes things smooth and easy!

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#86

Post by ch_123 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #77

jonfw wrote: post #7

I used fish for a couple of years and really liked it. But I recently learned that I can configure ZSH to have all of the same auto-complete and plugins that I loved from fish. Now I have all of the creature comforts I like, with POSIX compliance I found that while fish has better syntax than bash for most things, the hassles with incompatibility or unexpected behavior brought me much more trouble than BASH's syntax…

zsh is not POSIX compliant and never had a goal of being POSIX compliant. (Amusingly, I use bash and I can pretty much replace “zsh” in your claim with “bash” and have it apply to my usage-except in this case it would be true :P)

zsh has a POSIX compatibility mode, but it is not enabled by default. (You can see some details in the release notes: https://zsh.sourceforge.io/releases.html)

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#87

Post by xvf22 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #76

Ok, let's do this. Past related threads: Fish shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27180420 - May 2021 (118 comments) Fish Shell 3.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26302678 - March 2021 (128 comments) Fish is not operational on a VT220 terminal (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526237 - Dec 2020 (113 comments) New Features in the Fish Shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24631138…

I seriously hope you have automation to pull these in! Thanks!

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#88

Post by Barrin92 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #35

fouronnes3 wrote: post #30

I started a new job recently, and I've been thinking about terminals and shells. I love a well configured modern env, but I can't be bothered spending the literal HOURS you need to setup everything... zsh, zsh plugins, fzf, fzf plugins, fd, dot bare, patched fonts, 24 bit terminal color, temrinal color theme, binutils color theme, powerline, diff-so-fancy... I get that the devil is in the details, but come on, can I…

This is why most people have a dotfiles repo in their GitHub.

it's not such a trivial thing even if you manage dotfiles because a lot of things still break between different environments, different operating systems, don't work with new releases, rely on some folder structure that changes, etc, it still requires fiddling.

Of course you can get even more involved and manage your dotfiles with ansible or something but the advantage of a tool like fish is that it's almost perfectly usable out of the box. More config files will always increase the chance for things breaking.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#89

Post by pxc » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

boudin wrote: post #53

jordiburgos wrote: post #47

Not for me, it breaks the .sh scripts and have to be rewritten.

You don't need to rewrite any script as long as your scripts have the correct shebang, those scripts works perfectly. I would strongly not advise to make it the default shell though as this can lead to issues. The way I use it is to have bash as my main shell but my .bashrc starting fish if it's not started explicitly from bash: (it's a trick form arch wiki) if [[ $(ps --no-header --pid=$PPID --format=cmd) != "fish"…

> I would strongly not advise to make it the default shell though as this can lead to issues.

I've heard this a lot, but I've been using Fish as my login shell for many years, and it's really not a problem

I think maybe some vim plugins call out to your $SHELL or something, but assume that it's bash-like? but I've never run into a serious issue with just using Fish as my login shell

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#90

Post by emersion » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

> You can configure your shell using a web interface! Just run fish_config

As much as I like the fish shell, I really consider this an anti-feature. A TUI application to configure the shell would make much more sense. The terminal emulator is your platform, not the Web.