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Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

fishshell.com

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Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#21
post #11

I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because, I mean, what more could a shell? Then I got a new computer and decided to start from scratch with my tooling and downloaded fish. I was shocked how it instantly made zsh feel cumbersome and ancient . Heartily recommend others give it a try as a daily driver…

Do you mind sharing what you think are the killer features of fish?

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#22

> The one platform we care about a bit that it does not currently seem to have enough support for is Cygwin, which is sad, but we have to make a cut somewhere. > We’re also losing Cygwin as a supported platform for the time being, because there is no Rust target for Cygwin and so no way to build binaries targeting it. We hope that this situation changes in future, but we had also hoped it would improve during the alm…

It's strange how the article starts off complaining about C++'s platform "issues":

> We’ve experienced some pain with C++. In short:

> tools and compiler/platform differences

before conceding that, because of Rust, they 1) are actually dropping support for a platform they previously supported and 2) can only support (in theory) a small fraction of those platforms supported by g++, but that that's OK because those are the only platforms which really matter. I get that it's a trade-off, but it would have been more intellectually honest to just admit this is one area (portability, backwards compatibility, and ABI stability) where C++ mops the floor with Rust, instead of pretending it's a another paintpoint Rust avoids.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#23

> Fish also uses threads for its award-winning (note to editor: find an actual award) autosuggestions and syntax highlighting, and one long-term project is to add concurrency to the language. (note to editor: find an actual award)

They should make an award, like RL Stein did https://x.com/RL_Stine/status/1337768882988347393

Or like any car award that oems advertise.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#24
post #21
post #11

I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because, I mean, what more could a shell? Then I got a new computer and decided to start from scratch with my tooling and downloaded fish. I was shocked how it instantly made zsh feel cumbersome and ancient . Heartily recommend others give it a try as a daily driver…

Do you mind sharing what you think are the killer features of fish?

For me, it's that the ergonomics are straightforward, and everything works out of the box. If I find myself on a new machine, just installing fish gives me an ergonomic setup without having to install too many additional tools or mess with configuration.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#25
post #24
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing what you think are the killer features of fish?

For me, it's that the ergonomics are straightforward, and everything works out of the box. If I find myself on a new machine, just installing fish gives me an ergonomic setup without having to install too many additional tools or mess with configuration.

Also, fish_config is there if you want to make quick changes without having to look up syntax.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#26
post #11

I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because, I mean, what more could a shell? Then I got a new computer and decided to start from scratch with my tooling and downloaded fish. I was shocked how it instantly made zsh feel cumbersome and ancient . Heartily recommend others give it a try as a daily driver…

Interesting, I went the other way about 7 years ago - switched from fish to zsh (initially with oh-my-zsh). The interactive experience was similar enough on both shells, and the performance was great on fish and okay-ish on zsh, but two things won me over: 1. With zsh, I can copy-paste some bash snippet and in 99% of cases it will just work. Aside of copy-pasting from StackExchange, I also know a lot of bash syntax b…

> 2. For standalone scripts... well, I think it's best to reach for a proper programming language (e.g. Python) instead of any shell language, but if I had to use one, I would pick bash. Sure, it has many footguns, but I know them pretty well. And fish language is also not ideal - e.g. IIRC it doesn't have an equivalent of `set -e`, you have to add `; or return 1` to each line.

I'm sure you know this, but: no particular reason the interactive shell you use has to match the shell you use for scripts. All of my scripts are in bash, but I haven't used bash interactively in decades now, at least on purpose.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#27
post #21
post #11

I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because, I mean, what more could a shell? Then I got a new computer and decided to start from scratch with my tooling and downloaded fish. I was shocked how it instantly made zsh feel cumbersome and ancient . Heartily recommend others give it a try as a daily driver…

Do you mind sharing what you think are the killer features of fish?

Fish has a lot of features out of the box I find really useful:

* Command auto suggestions as you type based on your history

* History search (using up arrow) based on a partial command

* Helpful completions and descriptions when you hit TAB

* Muti-line command editing

* Syntax highlighting

You can get all those same features in Zsh by using plugins, but those features work out-of-the-box with Fish with zero configuration. Zsh is a bit of a pain to configure, and pretty anemic without plugins. Fish makes configuration optional because it works how you'd hope your shell would out of the box. Even though Zsh has those features as plugins, they're kinda janky, not well maintained, and often conflict with other plugins.

Additionally, Fish also has:

* Excellent built in commands (string, math, argparse)

* Sane scripting (word parsing where you don't need to quote everything, etc)

* Great documentation

* A web-based configuration if you're into that sort of thing (it's a bit of a gimmick for beginners)

The main reason I use Zsh (or Bash) at all is for POSIX/portability, or for when I can't install something else. But for an interactive shell on a machine I control, it's hard to compete with Fish for speed, features, and ease of use.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#28
post #11

I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because, I mean, what more could a shell? Then I got a new computer and decided to start from scratch with my tooling and downloaded fish. I was shocked how it instantly made zsh feel cumbersome and ancient . Heartily recommend others give it a try as a daily driver…

Interesting, I went the other way about 7 years ago - switched from fish to zsh (initially with oh-my-zsh). The interactive experience was similar enough on both shells, and the performance was great on fish and okay-ish on zsh, but two things won me over: 1. With zsh, I can copy-paste some bash snippet and in 99% of cases it will just work. Aside of copy-pasting from StackExchange, I also know a lot of bash syntax b…

I use fish and on the very, very rare occasion I need to copy and paste bash from the internet it's pretty easy to just type 'bash' into fish and paste it in. Its not like bash and fish conflict, you can have them both installed.
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