A question for people who have already switched to the fish shell: What is the biggest drawback of using fish? For example, you get accustomed to it on your system and then have to work with Bash or Zsh on your company’s server systems. And if I’m going to make such a big switch from Bash to fish, then why not switch to Nushell instead?
Fish 4
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Re: Fish 4
#102A question for people who have already switched to the fish shell: What is the biggest drawback of using fish? For example, you get accustomed to it on your system and then have to work with Bash or Zsh on your company’s server systems. And if I’m going to make such a big switch from Bash to fish, then why not switch to Nushell instead?
Biggest drawback is unfamiliarity with the syntax, but that comes with time in my experience. I think the syntax is overall better and much better documented.
I switched to fish because for most interactive use case it’s so much better, without requiring any new muscle memory. I tried zsh at first but it winds up slow to get even close to where fish is out of the box. I still end up scripting in bash or sh for portability.
nu-shell won’t be available in as many places, and it looks to me like it would change paradigm in a way that would hinder working with bash or zsh over time. That’s just my 2c though as I have only briefly glanced at it and haven’t truly considered using it.
Re: Fish 4
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not too late for "Rewrite it in Zig" or "Rewrite it in Ada".
Or "Revert back to C++" would be funny. Apparently no one around here has a sense of humor, though, since my original post was heavily downvoted. I greatly prefer Rust over C++, but "rewrite it in Rust" has become kind of a meme. And if you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?
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Re: Fish 4
#104A question for people who have already switched to the fish shell: What is the biggest drawback of using fish? For example, you get accustomed to it on your system and then have to work with Bash or Zsh on your company’s server systems. And if I’m going to make such a big switch from Bash to fish, then why not switch to Nushell instead?
I use Fish as a user shell everywhere I can and end up using Bash daily for scripting and on servers/VMs/containers at work, I've also been using Nushell a lot recently for personal scripts.
Biggest drawbacks for me is mixing up a few bits of syntax and some software doesn't ship Fish completion scripts, although I never write scripts in Fish which reduces the syntax I actually use.
In my opinion Fish is worth it just for the auto complete suggestions alone, but I also really like the way it handles editing config, it's sane default config, understandable error messages, and plug-ins.
Nushell is very nice, but I find it doesn't match the usability of Fish for interactive shells. Love it for scripts though.
Re: Fish 4
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC, you yourself commented a few years ago in a thread on HN that the Rust situation was still a lot like "because of certain guarantees Rust makes we should be able to perform tons of optimizations that C++ could never do, and we haven't even gotten around to implementing most of them yet", has that situation improved a lot since? ("a few" might be off by pre-pandemic amount of years, my memory is a bit fuzzy ther…
I vaguely remember that :) It's progressed in the sense of like, the Unsafe Code Guidelines and opsem teams are hammering down the exact semantics still, and have made a lot of progress. I'm not aware of any actual optimization work taking place off of it yet, which would make sense given that it's not all fully hammered out yet. I also might have been handwaving towards how restrict kept having to be turned off beca…
Yeah I forgot the exact context of the quote too, no worries :). EDIT: it probably had something to do with aliasing and alignment (because when aren't people sighing about C/C++ when it comes to that topic?)
Thank for the general update! I might not write any Rust code myself, but I do enjoy quite a few programs written in it, so I was hoping to hear there was more progress for the sake of the developers behind those programs. But I can also imagine that these kind of things take time to figure out properly, to avoid repeating mistakes of previous languages (and that's before we even get to the task of implementing anything).
Wish the people working on these issues all the best, and looking forward (from the sidelines) to what eventually comes out of it!
Re: Fish 4
#106A question for people who have already switched to the fish shell: What is the biggest drawback of using fish? For example, you get accustomed to it on your system and then have to work with Bash or Zsh on your company’s server systems. And if I’m going to make such a big switch from Bash to fish, then why not switch to Nushell instead?
The main drawback is that I'm used to all the goodness that comes by default and have to get used to how primitive Bash is when I'm forced to use it.
I also prefer fish's scripting syntax (and built-in utilities) over bash, and some people don't like installing fish to run my scripts.
Nushell is far from fish in terms of interactive usage, and I find the scripting language to be too unstable for writing scripts you want to keep in the medium term.
Re: Fish 4
#107How much larger is the binary after rewriting it in Rust?
The Rust version (4.0.0) has 73k lines of Rust, builds in 1m34s, and the binary is 4.3 MB.
The C++ version (3.7.1) has 55k lines of C++, builds in 1m8s, and the binary is 2.4 MB.
Both were built with CMake with default settings on a MacBook with M1 Pro.
So, the new binary is 1.8x in size and takes 1.4x of the time to build.
Re: Fish 4
#108The rustport blog post says they lost support for Cygwin because it's not a supported Rust target. Looks like there is a fork for this: https://github.com/ookiineko-cygport/rust There have been discussions about adding the target to Rust, but they have not been pursued: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/79854 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/5526
The rust cygwin target has been merged (in a different attempt): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/134999
Nice!
Re: Fish 4
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
My only annoyance with fish is when I copy bash one liners and forget, and get errors or issues. Otherwise, fish is fantastic.
There's a nice way to halfway-fix that issue. It makes use of the fact that most bash commands that we copy are prefixed with a $ and a space. It also requires your terminal emulator to have a way to hook into the paste mechanism and edit the to-be-pasted text. To my knowledge, Kitty and iTerm both have this feature. Basically, the terminal will replace each line of the pasted text that match (start with) $ rest with…
This is nice! But you should probably use $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR or /run/user/1000 instead of /tmp
Re: Fish 4
#110I recently built my own shell to better understand its complexity and how it works under the hood. I also implemented redirections and partial tab completion. While I get that writing a shell isn’t the easiest task, I still don’t fully understand why there are so many different ones. I’ve been using the default shell on macOS, and so far, it works just fine.
I go another notch: Why are so many different ones with so little major changes. If you experience the `shell` of FoxPro DOS or other tools you will see how poor are the ones we tolerate now. Is like we still live in the age of `ed`. (I even remember one of this projects have the joke that is finally a `terminal for the 90s!` or something like. Shells in common use a very poor things!)
Most people reading this didn't experience FoxPro DOS probably. Why not say more?