Awesome to see. Can't wait to see how things improve from here.
Here's the code if you were looking for it: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/tree/4.0b1
Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#32I 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…
I went bash -> fish -> zsh.
The main reason I switched is because zsh can (often) source bash scripts and can use bash completion scripts (usually), and I was tired of having to translate things from bash to fish. I also ran into a few things where something that was relatively easy to do in bash was impossible to do with fish. But that was years ago so maybe that is less of an issue now, and I don't remember exactly what it was.
Having used zsh, I think a big advantage it has over fish is the completions. There are completions available for more programs for zsh, and the zsh completions are sometimes higher quality in zsh.
But I do generally like the syntax, and good out of the box experience of fish. I wish it had a bash or even posix compatibility mode and more available completions.
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#33I'd be really interested to hear from distro packagers how this is going - how amenable is rust-fish to being packaged following e.g. Debian guidelines?
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#34I 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…
Same here. I used it for about 3 days before I installed it on all my systems and permanently switched. For me, it was like the first time I learned a non-Latin language, and my eyes were opened to how much stuff I took for granted was completely arbitrary.
For example, here's how you write an autoloaded function "foo" in Fish: you make a file called "foo.fish" in its config directory. Inside that, you write "function foo ..." to implement it. There's no step 3. That's it.
Want to customize your shell prompt? Follow the process above to write a function called "fish_prompt" that uses normal scripting things like echo, pwd, git, or whatever to write your prompt to the screen. There's no step 2. That's it.
Fish was revelatory. Other shells of the same vintage feel hopelessly outdated to me now. For context, I was the maintainer of FreeBSD's "bash-completion" port for a few years way back when. It's not that I don't have experience with other shells. I have plenty. I just don't want to use any of the others now.
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#35> 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…
Yeah, it's somewhat interesting that they point to Debian's popcon (which is opt-in), when the statistics are basically coming from amd64, whereas I think it would be much more interesting (if possible) to see what the number of installs of fish are on openwrt (and other embedded distros). Currently the openwrt fish install is ~2MB (which is massive on a router), I wonder what the new install size will be with the rust version, and if practically they've dropped everything except desktop/server linux and MacOS?
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#36I 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…
As a go programmer, "; or return" makes a lot of sense to me
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#37Is fish better than Zsh?
It's definitely better out of the box, with no configuration. If you add a bunch of fancy plugins to zsh then they can be very similar
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#38> What would test -x say on Windows, which has no executable bit?
It would say whether the file extension is executable (part of pathext env variable)
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#39Congrats to the fish team! Great writeup with lots of interesting detail. I wonder if this is the biggest project that has moved from C++ entirely to Rust (or maybe even C to Rust?) It probably has useful lessons for other projects. If I'm reading this right, it looks like fish was not released as a hybrid C++ / Rust program, with the autocxx-generated bindings. There was a release during that time, but it says "fish…
Although Clang does set the `__GNUC__` macro and you have to distinguish it using the `__clang__` macro, Clang and GCC also both have very fine-grained feature detection features as well, both at the CLI level and in the preprocessor (such as the `__has_feature` family of builtins).
Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
#40Congratulations. Rust is really a great language. I wrote a small rust web server and its been a year and it seems to work great on $5 vps without any issue.