The fish shell is amazing • Hacker News Board

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#21

Post by nerdponx » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

kbd wrote: post #16

As another commenter pointed out, while Fish has some nice out-of-the-box features, they’re all achievable in Zsh with a few lines of plugins. And did you know Zsh has a short for loop? Along with fantastic plugins like fzf-tab, I don’t see a reason to use anything else right now. Though, I’m keeping a very interested eye on Nu shell. They’re doing a lot of stuff right, and I expect it will become a very useful scrip…

Zsh has become an indispensable power tool for me. I am interested in other shells (especially PowerShell), but Zsh is now embedded deep in my brain, next to Vim and Python, and I doubt I will ever seriously migrate away.

That said: what do you like about Nu shell specifically?

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#22

Post by rainingmonkey » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

jonfw wrote: post #7

I used fish for a couple of years and really liked it. But I recently learned that I can configure ZSH to have all of the same auto-complete and plugins that I loved from fish. Now I have all of the creature comforts I like, with POSIX compliance I found that while fish has better syntax than bash for most things, the hassles with incompatibility or unexpected behavior brought me much more trouble than BASH's syntax…

POSIX compliance has never brought me any issues, if I want bash syntax I just use `bash -c COMMAND`. You can invoke bash scripts with `bash SCRIPT` or just add the bash shebang `#!/bin/bash` to the top of your script, set the executable bit and invoke directly.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#23

Post by Shared404 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #18

purerandomness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fish never claimed to be POSIX compliant to begin with, so no. There never was an 'extend' step.

But seems to want us to replace the old reliable shell with it (Or this is what I understand). I see a lot of people reinventing the wheel in Linux and trying to appeal the new users. What you have in the end is normally worse than the standard ones. Is just dissecting Linux in a lot of smaller particles and smaller rooms. So thanks, but not thanks. Not to me. Wouldn't be much more practical to use all of those talen…

Sometimes to improve on old ideas or develop new ones you need to start over.

See plan9, RedoxOS, TempleOS, Gemini, etc.

None of these are currently in a position to gain dominance, but they all explore a space that couldn't be explored starting with a prior code base.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#24

Post by rainingmonkey » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

kbd wrote: post #16

As another commenter pointed out, while Fish has some nice out-of-the-box features, they’re all achievable in Zsh with a few lines of plugins. And did you know Zsh has a short for loop? Along with fantastic plugins like fzf-tab, I don’t see a reason to use anything else right now. Though, I’m keeping a very interested eye on Nu shell. They’re doing a lot of stuff right, and I expect it will become a very useful scrip…

> while Fish has some nice out-of-the-box features, they’re all achievable in Zsh with a few lines of plugins.

The point of fish is that there is no configuration required.

You don't have to learn to configure it, you don't have to be part of "the community" to learn which plugins to use, you'll be able to sit in front of any fish prompt and have it work as expected without having to move dotfiles around.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#25

Post by woodruffw » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #18

purerandomness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fish never claimed to be POSIX compliant to begin with, so no. There never was an 'extend' step.

But seems to want us to replace the old reliable shell with it (Or this is what I understand). I see a lot of people reinventing the wheel in Linux and trying to appeal the new users. What you have in the end is normally worse than the standard ones. Is just dissecting Linux in a lot of smaller particles and smaller rooms. So thanks, but not thanks. Not to me. Wouldn't be much more practical to use all of those talen…

There are lots of "old reliable shells" that are POSIX incompatible. (t)csh[1] is the first family that comes to mind.

The EEE analogy is more applicable to GNU Bash anyways: it extended the POSIX sh baseline with a bunch of GNUisms that a lot of "POSIX" sh scripts now unintentionally use.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#26

Post by user-the-name » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

kbd wrote: post #16

As another commenter pointed out, while Fish has some nice out-of-the-box features, they’re all achievable in Zsh with a few lines of plugins. And did you know Zsh has a short for loop? Along with fantastic plugins like fzf-tab, I don’t see a reason to use anything else right now. Though, I’m keeping a very interested eye on Nu shell. They’re doing a lot of stuff right, and I expect it will become a very useful scrip…

zsh has this absolutely ridiculous case of feature shyness. It has tons of great features, which it goes to great lengths to hide from you for some indecipherable reason.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#27

Post by ribit » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

I really love fish and the philosophy behind it, especially the "configurability is the root of all evil" attitude. Makes for a well though out software that is a true pleasure to use.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#28

Post by jscheel » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

jonfw wrote: post #7

I used fish for a couple of years and really liked it. But I recently learned that I can configure ZSH to have all of the same auto-complete and plugins that I loved from fish. Now I have all of the creature comforts I like, with POSIX compliance I found that while fish has better syntax than bash for most things, the hassles with incompatibility or unexpected behavior brought me much more trouble than BASH's syntax…

This is my problem as well. I’ve been using fish for quite a long time, and I’m still frustrated by weird posix incompatibility.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#29

Post by GrinningFool » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

kbd wrote: post #16

As another commenter pointed out, while Fish has some nice out-of-the-box features, they’re all achievable in Zsh with a few lines of plugins. And did you know Zsh has a short for loop? Along with fantastic plugins like fzf-tab, I don’t see a reason to use anything else right now. Though, I’m keeping a very interested eye on Nu shell. They’re doing a lot of stuff right, and I expect it will become a very useful scrip…

Thanks for that, fzf-tab was the last missing piece in my setup.

Re: The fish shell is amazing

#30

Post by fouronnes3 » Thu, Nov 25, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

I started a new job recently, and I've been thinking about terminals and shells. I love a well configured modern env, but I can't be bothered spending the literal HOURS you need to setup everything... zsh, zsh plugins, fzf, fzf plugins, fd, dot bare, patched fonts, 24 bit terminal color, temrinal color theme, binutils color theme, powerline, diff-so-fancy... I get that the devil is in the details, but come on, can I just have a single "terminal environnement distribution" with sensible defaults and that's it. Something like SpaceMacs/SpaceVim but for all that. I don't want to spend the time configuring and maintaining this wonderful pile of obsolete-and-yet-somehow-still-the-best-we-got technology.