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Fish shell

fishshell.com

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Re: Fish shell

#61

Post by ufo »

themodelplumber wrote: post #53
barosl wrote: post #46

I definitely recommend fish to every newcomer to Unix. It has sane defaults, colorful output, and so many features that work out of the box. That said, there is a long-standing issue regarding inline environment variables.[1] Briefly speaking, fish does not recognize the `NAME=value command` form. So you should use `env` to work around this. This may not be a deal breaker, but I'm a bit annoyed, and migrated to zsh.…

Fish is great. I used it for a couple of years, right up until I had to install a software system that made extensive use of bash scripts that were incompatible with it. At the time I was in too much of a hurry to figure out how to tell the software to explicitly use bash, or something along those lines.

As a rule of thumb you should make fish the default shell for your terminal emulator and leave bash as the login shell. This will let all the system configuration scripts work just fine.

The only time when POSIX incompatibility still hurts is if your workflow requires you to be source shell snippets.

Re: Fish shell

#62

Post by hurin »

0942v8653 wrote: post #25

I used to use fish, and emacs. But when I switched to vim, I had to switch away from fish as well because of its lack of vi bindings. It is a little disappointing to go back to using bash, but as long as bash-completion is working, it's not really a big issue. Of course, I do miss the syntax highlighting. (I would use zsh, but it provides little benefit over bash out of the box and is slower (oh-my-zsh is unbearably…

> Goes without saying, but bash-completion. Fish's completion is mostly history-based, which is great for repeatedly running the same command, but terrible for discoverability

Fish has both kinds of completion. You can hit tab to get a list of possible completions (command-list based) if there is more than one, if there is only one possible command it will tab-complete. You can also customize this list.

Re: Fish shell

#63

Post by pooriaazimi »

robin_reala wrote: post #56
tambourine_man wrote: post #43

Since Apple seems forever stuck on an ancient Bash version (due to GPL 3, I believe), I keep hoping they switch to Fish (or a home built solution, à la Swift, which could be interesting) with every OS release.

Fish does feel very Appley to me. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Well, "ridiculous_fish", the guy who sort of revived the fish shell is an engineer on the AppKit team at Apple: http://ridiculousfish.com

I remember installing and using fish 4 or 5 years ago; it was not a great experience -- but after he "took over", I switched and couldn't be happier with fish.

Re: Fish shell

#64

Post by 0942v8653 »

hurin wrote: post #62
0942v8653 wrote: post #25

I used to use fish, and emacs. But when I switched to vim, I had to switch away from fish as well because of its lack of vi bindings. It is a little disappointing to go back to using bash, but as long as bash-completion is working, it's not really a big issue. Of course, I do miss the syntax highlighting. (I would use zsh, but it provides little benefit over bash out of the box and is slower (oh-my-zsh is unbearably…

> Goes without saying, but bash-completion. Fish's completion is mostly history-based, which is great for repeatedly running the same command, but terrible for discoverability Fish has both kinds of completion. You can hit tab to get a list of possible completions (command-list based) if there is more than one, if there is only one possible command it will tab-complete. You can also customize this list.

It does, but bash-completion has a long list of supported commands. Not just git, but also modprobe, pygmentize, youtube-dl, even grub…

Re: Fish shell

#65

Post by nilved »

eridius wrote: post #54
themodelplumber wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fish is great. I used it for a couple of years, right up until I had to install a software system that made extensive use of bash scripts that were incompatible with it. At the time I was in too much of a hurry to figure out how to tell the software to explicitly use bash, or something along those lines.

Why would a software system that relies on bash not explicitly use bash for its scripts?

Bad developers. For example, I used Arch Linux for a number of years, where `/bin/sh` is a symlink to bash. Switching that to point to `dash` broke a number of programs both in the official repositories and the AUR. A lot of shell scripters can't spot a bashism, and just as many don't know that other shell syntax even exists.

Re: Fish shell

#66

Post by hurin »

WD-42 wrote: post #15

Fish is great. For those wondering what advantages is has over zsh+ohmyzsh, I can say is that by default it provides most the functionality you want without having to install/tweak anything. Git support is built in (you get a nice git prompt) there's syntax highlighting, amazing history completion, predictive commands, man page completions... and so on. To try it on linux, just install fish and then run "fish", to ge…

> Only problem is it's not POSIX so there is some weirdness in command substitution, logical operators and stuff. So you still script in sh.

Yeah some wild-card matching stuff doesn't work, also for example expanding `pkg-config --cflags gobject-2.0` as one would in bash requires calling eval gcc.

On the other-hand it's not like Bash doesn't have weird gotcha's -- for example does anyone remember which of these is a valid conditional?

  string='Foo Bar';
  if [[ *"Foo"* == $string ]]
  if [[ $string == *"Foo"* ]]

Re: Fish shell

#67

Post by baghira »

juliangregorian wrote: post #47
0942v8653 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my bash is mostly the default that Debian provides (only semi-relevant option I have enabled is globstar, which is just the recursive globbing). I guess I didn't mean that zsh wasn't that much better, just that I didn't think it was that much better. I may switch to zsh eventually, but I just switched shells and I don't really want to do it again very soon.

Debian uses dash actually, not bash. I rather prefer it that way since dash is strictly POSIX compliant. Takes some of the tediousness out of creating portable shell scripts.

/bin/sh on debian is dash, but the default interactive shell is still bash (sorry for nitpicking).

Re: Fish shell

#68

Post by thristian »

juliangregorian wrote: post #47
0942v8653 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my bash is mostly the default that Debian provides (only semi-relevant option I have enabled is globstar, which is just the recursive globbing). I guess I didn't mean that zsh wasn't that much better, just that I didn't think it was that much better. I may switch to zsh eventually, but I just switched shells and I don't really want to do it again very soon.

Debian uses dash actually, not bash. I rather prefer it that way since dash is strictly POSIX compliant. Takes some of the tediousness out of creating portable shell scripts.

Debian uses dash as /bin/sh, but newly-created accounts default to /bin/bash as their login shell.

Re: Fish shell

#69

Post by hurin »

0942v8653 wrote: post #64
hurin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Goes without saying, but bash-completion. Fish's completion is mostly history-based, which is great for repeatedly running the same command, but terrible for discoverability Fish has both kinds of completion. You can hit tab to get a list of possible completions (command-list based) if there is more than one, if there is only one possible command it will tab-complete. You can also customize this list.

It does, but bash-completion has a long list of supported commands. Not just git, but also modprobe, pygmentize, youtube-dl, even grub…

You can add/write your own completions for fish http://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html#completion

Re: Fish shell

#70

Post by kolev »

Fish is definitely good, but not great enough to justify a switch from Bash. I maintain tens of thousands of lines of Bash scripts and was considering switching to Fish once, but decided it wasn't worth it.

When you compare the *nix shells to PowerShell, they feel prehistoric. We all use grep, sed, awk, and the likes, but don't you get tired of having to deal with unstructured data and gross limitations of the shell like basic data structures. Yes, the purpose of the shell is to be quick and dirty, but it doesn't take that much to add some programming sanity and some standards for structured data! There's a port of PowerShell to Mono, Pash [0], but it's so heavy in terms of requirements and has somewhat unclear future. Of course, there's also Xonsh [1] and Xiki [2], but they are pretty new.

[0] https://pash-project.github.io/

[1] http://xonsh.org/

[2] http://xiki.org/

P.S. One of my favorite Fish feature is Event Handling [3].

[3] http://fishshell.com/docs/current/#event

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