Comment by thayne
2 years ago
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.
I can relate with your comment a few years ago, but later the situation drastically got better, while not perfect yet (i.e. I still need a custom autocomplete function for aws). You might want to give it a try now anyway.
I used bash for ages, and never really saw what zsh offered in comparison: I would have had to customize it almost as much as bash, and it didn’t really give me anything new.
Fish was so much better than either out of the box, and I still have done virtually no configuration other than setting it up to use my common starship prompt, which is supported in bash as well.
I don’t understand personally the argument about not having bash syntax. If I want it, I just run `bash`.
> I don’t understand personally the argument about not having bash syntax.
Three main reasons:
1. The Fish language is only useful only for somehow extend fish itself, so it is pointless to spend time learning and practicing it unless I'm writing something for me or other Fish users.
2. Sometimes we need to copy and paste something to our shell. When using Fish I must remember to set variables with set, get the status code with $status instead of $?, use () instead of $() and so on, which is a unnecessary overhead
3. Bash's syntax is a hell: sometimes we forget a space, an escape, use end or done when we need to use fi or esac and so on. I don't trust my Bash code, I type everything in the terminal to check if everything is ok. In Fish I just can't do that...
> If I want it, I just run `bash`
That's what I do for 2 and 3. But when I do that I don't have the nice features of Fish...
I still love Fish, though.