Comment by kstrauser
2 years ago
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 Other shells of the same vintage feel hopelessly outdated to me now.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.
This was more convincing to me than the GP comment, especially the shell prompt part.
Is the “foo.fish” name required? Could I have “bar.fish” with “function foo…” inside and still autoload function foo?
Not autoload, no. You can have as many functions as you want in a single .fish file, but it'll only be lazily autoloaded if it has the same name as the command you are trying to execute. It's how we avoid doing the I/O of scanning all fish directories and parsing their contents at startup.
...and you can still explicitly source the files if you want to load the functions elsewhere.