Comment by ratorx
1 day ago
For POSIX: I leave Bash as the system shell and then shim into Fish only for interactive terminals. This works surprisingly well, and any POSIX env initialisation will be inherited. I very rarely need to do something complicated enough in the REPL of the terminal and can start a subshell if needed.
Fish is nicer to script in by far, and you can keep those isolated with shebang lines and still run Bash scripts (with a proper shebang line). The only thing that’s tricky is `source` and equivalents, but I don’t think I’ve ever needed this in my main shell and not a throw-away sub shell.
I often write multi-line commands in my zsh shell, like while-loops. The nice thing is that I can readily put them in a script if needed.
I guess that somewhat breaks with fish: either you use bash -c '...' from the start, or you adopt the fish syntax, which means you need to convert again when you switch to a (bash) script.
I guess my workflow for this is more fragmented. Either I’m prototyping a script (and edit and test it directly) or just need throwaway loop (in which case fish is nicer).
I also don’t trust myself to not screw up anything more complex than running a command on Bash, without the guard rails of something like shellcheck!
I used to do it this way, but then having the mentally switch from the one to the other became too much of a hassle. Since I realized I only had basic needs, zsh with incremental history search and the like was good enough.
I don't care for mile-long prompts displaying everything under the sun, so zsh is plenty fast.