Fish: Finally, a command line shell for the 90s

It gives me great joy every time a new command-line-related project is released (or, as in this case, gets a major update). I will dedicate a few hours of my weekend to take this for a thorough spin!

1:

a. Superb readline colouring. Nonexistent commands are shown in red, commands that exist and are on PATH in green. Unclosed string literals become obvious.

b. A history search that is orders of magnitude better that Ctrl-r in Bash. (Though oh-my-zsh has the history-substring-search plugin which provides this functionality.)

c. Features work out of the box, fish helps you avoid managing a .zshrc equivalent file.

d. Tab completion offers hints. If I type l, I get:

  leaftoppm  (Convert Interleaf image format to a portable anymap)
  less                                          (Opposite of more)
  lessecho                                 (Expand metacharacters)
  lessfile                        ("input preprocessor" for less.)
  lesskey                          (Specify key bindings for less)
  lesspipe                        ("input preprocessor" for less.)
  lexgrog                  (Parse header information in man pages)

(These summaries are the first lines of the man pages.)

2: I've only seen it crash on me once, which matches my experience with zsh. YMMV.

I used fish exclusively for a number of years, but eventually moved back to something sh-compatible. Too many wrapper scripts assume this.

If you run chsh and get error "/usr/local/bin/fish: non-standard shell" simply add /usr/local/bin/fish to /etc/shells. Just to save you a Google search :)

The law of orthogonality http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/design.html#or...

Hard to tell from docs if fish has vi mode? vi mode is the main thing I love about bash.