top | item 14179081

The fish shell is awesome

15 points| nikbackm | 9 years ago |jvns.ca | reply

7 comments

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[+] asrp|9 years ago|reply
I switched to fish a bit more than a year ago. I used to have a script with shorthands of frequently used long commands because I just couldn't get to them easily enough with bash's ctrl+r.

Now with fish, I don't need that anymore. Pressing up a few times always gets what I need and I don't need to come up with names for shorthands. (If I really want to name it, I can always add a # "tag" at the end. A trick I picked up from one of the post here (I can't remember which one).)

Although sometimes I do wish there was a keyword search feature treating space as a separator for what I've already typed. One frequent case is when I'm looking for `rsync --bunch --of --options user@server:path other_path`. I remember `rsync` and I remember `user@server` (or one of the two paths) but not the rest (and I also ssh, sftp, scp, etc to the same place a lot).

[+] mixedCase|9 years ago|reply
Personally, if POSIX compliance wasn't mandatory I'd go one step further and go with Xonsh, which offers more tangible benefits.

As it is, I can add a couple of plugins to zsh with zgen and get most of what makes fish interesting. They're great ideas, but there's no need to sacrifice so much for them.

[+] bfred_it|9 years ago|reply
Fish' auto completion is what's been keeping me on it all these years. I tried to switch to zsh and hack some autocomplete on, but it didn't work nearly as well.
[+] thomastjeffery|9 years ago|reply
It's nice, but it has its rough edges.

Just look at the longstanding HISTFILE issue. (I would link it, but GitHub doesn't have search on mobile)

[+] moondev|9 years ago|reply
Incompatible with bash which is ubiquitous. I much prefer zsh which can do everything fish can