Comment by rukshn
2 days ago
I switched to fish shell with star ship. Fish has autocomplete and syntax highlighting out of the box which is quite neat and the main features I use in omgzh so fish was a safe choice for me
2 days ago
I switched to fish shell with star ship. Fish has autocomplete and syntax highlighting out of the box which is quite neat and the main features I use in omgzh so fish was a safe choice for me
Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue. I use zsh+starship and my own very minimal init stuff+zsh autocomplete and syntaxhighlihg plugins. It’s not a perfect setup. I wish fish would “just work” but it doesn’t. Frequently I had to look up for “workarounds” for my setup. 25 years in, I think I got it and i just keep my zshrc and `machine-init.sh` on point for my-own-style-experience. I think a lot of that could be simplified with fish+starship, but it’s just not there.
> Fish is also not POSIX which has always been its, and my, issue
Could you give some examples of issues you encountered because of that? I've been using fish for about 8 years now I can't remember an instance where that was a problem in interactive use.
Same here. More than 5 years with fish and it’s been like 5 times when not-POSIX was an “issue”, which I’ve been solving by temporarily entering bash and rerunning the command there.
Issue is the cognitive overhead to know 2 distinct shell languages. One you use, and one (almost) everyone else uses. If later isn't of your concern and Fish is all you interact with then no issue whatsoever for interactive or/and scripting use.
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For me it’s always been an inability to “copy this command from stackoverflow” (or in the modern day, it’ll be copy this from ChatGPT) into your shell. Maybe it’s better now, but the last time I seriously gave fish a chance was 2014.
Also one of may main use case is documenting things other developers can do to make their life easier. There are handful of things where zsh behaves differently than bash. And while those handful of thins are not even a POSIX or shell things, they often come up.
The reality is, every day I’m fighting with “developers” who don’t know what the difference between AWS, Linux, and bash is. Throwing “fish” into the mix seems like I’m just being obtuse for no reason. I have sept hours trying to explain to some dumbass that git-bash on windows is not the same thing as Linux only for them to call me “oh he really cares about ‘bash’”-guy. While claiming they are “Linux developers” as they use macOS.
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Yeah. I used zsh for decades, invested a reasonable amount of emotion and time in my config but swapped to fish last year as a sort of January trial and it stuck.
It's not perfect, the lack of HEREDOCs are annoying sometimes, and no background-able blocks (eg `{x}&`) means you can't async things as easily in scripts.
Zsh has a lot of advanced stuff (at least for a shell) that can deliver pretty complex scripting such as throw/catching, mountains of variable flags and switches which I do miss when I write fish scripts but really -- I've abused them a lot over the years and now days I would be more likely to just use a "builds to a single binary" language.
I will probably swap to nushell when it gets a bit more stable (in my experience it's runtime is stable, but it's feature set / command names are still shaking out. I really like it's general ideas though in terms operating on structured data.
Also, you probably don’t need to customize it at all, it’s more than good enough out of the box.