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The fish shell is amazing

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Re: The fish shell is amazing

#101
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while Fish has some nice out-of-the-box features, they’re all achievable in Zsh with a few lines of plugins. The point of fish is that there is no configuration required. You don't have to learn to configure it, you don't have to be part of "the community" to learn which plugins to use, you'll be able to sit in front of any fish prompt and have it work as expected without having to move dotfiles around.

That's a cool argument for Fish for beginners. When you spend thousands of hours in a shell that doesn't matter as much. I don't see any benefit for someone who has Zsh set up well, but yes you do have to google once how to configure auto-completion and so on.

Probably little for anyone who has any shell “set up well”. Just if they are tired of spending time tweaking things and would rather more capable out of the box experiences so they can benefit from features added to the core shell without hunting for plugins.

I use Fish, however I also use Vim and do the plugin hunt there. I enjoy it, but I’m glad to not be doing it for both my environments.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#102
post #92
post #11

Fish is good, but most shells pale in comparison to powershell unfortunately.

PowerShell is definitely way more capable a scripting language, but it pales in comparison to Fish when it comes to speed, ease, and pleasantness of interactive use. There's a new generation of shells on the rise which look up to both Fish and PowerShell as models of different virtues they want to embody. A lot of them are already usable, and some day a few of them will be killer apps for developers and sysadmins

Nothing is speedier, easier, or more interactive than Get-Help in Powershell.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

Using other shells is like living in the stone age. I don't know why people would do that to themselves.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#103
post #11

Fish is good, but most shells pale in comparison to powershell unfortunately.

PowerShell: Maybe the learning curve is steep or something, but the times I've had to use it I disliked it. I want to like it. It's goals and purposes seem to be in the right place, but.... Nope.

[deleted]

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#104

Shells and scripting languages are different things. I don't care how good of a scripting language Powershell is, it's painful to use as a shell. I don't care that fish can't run sh scripts, I've never used it on a machine that didn't have sh. Can we stop judging oranges for their lack of crunch?

It's pretty common to copy-paste POSIX sh one-liners, or `source` a simple script. fish makes this annoying to do.

I’ll trade the occasional minor annoyance for the day-to-day ease of use that fish provides

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#105

Shells and scripting languages are different things. I don't care how good of a scripting language Powershell is, it's painful to use as a shell. I don't care that fish can't run sh scripts, I've never used it on a machine that didn't have sh. Can we stop judging oranges for their lack of crunch?

It's pretty common to copy-paste POSIX sh one-liners, or `source` a simple script. fish makes this annoying to do.

bash -c "PASTE_HERE"

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#107
post #74

Shells and scripting languages are different things. I don't care how good of a scripting language Powershell is, it's painful to use as a shell. I don't care that fish can't run sh scripts, I've never used it on a machine that didn't have sh. Can we stop judging oranges for their lack of crunch?

Ideally you do want them to be the same, so that the skill of using one reinforces the skill of using the other, and you can begin to shape scripts out of your shell history. Output redirection doesn't work right with Fish functions, which makes them unusable in certain kinds of scripts. Aside from that, though, Fish is perfectly pleasant for simple scripting. I use Fish for simple stuff and PowerShell for anything s…

Agreed. I liked fish last time I tried it (probably over a decade ago), but bash scripting is what I'm familiar with and it's just so convenient in day-to-day usage to be able to throw out one-liners for mundane things and then have them permanently searchable in my history.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#108

Shells and scripting languages are different things. I don't care how good of a scripting language Powershell is, it's painful to use as a shell. I don't care that fish can't run sh scripts, I've never used it on a machine that didn't have sh. Can we stop judging oranges for their lack of crunch?

It's pretty common to copy-paste POSIX sh one-liners, or `source` a simple script. fish makes this annoying to do.

Actually, in the last few years this gripe has gone away, at least for me. Once they added proper support for `VAR=val cmd && othercmd`, I haven't run across any one-liners that didn't work in fish.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#109
post #89
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't remember the root cause as it was a while ago now, but in my case I couldn't login on a TTY because of that.
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