I've been using the original fish[1] for years. I'm very biased, I love fish for many reasons and despite the claims that zsh can do the same things I've never had cause to switch from it. Now it was quite disappointing to see the original fish project seemingly halted. So this isn't simply great news, in the sense that development has been picked back up in the fishfish fork, some great improvements have been made at the same time!
* autosuggestion
(this actually has a great amount of utility for me.
it complements tab-completion quite well!)
* optional web-based config
(great for quickly editing your config settings)
* speed improvements
(although I never suffered from much lag with fish
to begin with)
Overall I think the usability and utility of fish is greatly improved in this fork. Also it's worth pointing out that in terms of out-of-box functionality, some of fishfish features would be very hard to match. Things like autocompletion and simple history scrollback based one partial string matching set fish apart from the pack imo. So far, I'm quite impressed and I hope that more people adopt fishfish as the de facto replacement for fish.
I use fish (http://fishshell.com/), and it's amazing. However, they're missing the most important feature from their front page: Syntax highlighting!
Valid executables are colored green, as you type.
Invalid commands are red, as you type.
Valid files are underlined, as you type.
Like the carpenter who can feels the feedback of the grain of the wood through the handle of his plane can adjust his technique as he planes, fish shell lets me 'feel' the programs and files I'm working with through the shell.
I stopped using fish a while ago, when it would crash whenever I opened a console session (so I couldn't do anything when X didn't start). I switched to zsh with fish emulation, but lately I realized I have a shell that takes much longer to start up and basically does everything fish does, and nothing more.
If fishfish is more stable, I'll switch in a heartbeat.
A bit more context: Ridiculous Fish is an Apple Engineer on the AppKit team. He also has a nice hex editor for the Mac (Hex Fiend) and an interesting programming Blog:
zsh used to do this for me (back when I used it; switched back to bash about a year ago now), and it was the most _annoying_ thing it ever did. My typical workflow (when working on a software project) involves a pair of terminals for compiling and execution, an editor window (whether gvim or kate/kile/kdevelop etc.), and a documentation terminal for manpages.
Oftentimes my execution lines are somewhat long -- enabling/disable debugging info in certain sections of the program while tracing programs, etc, and I'd not want to type them out continuously. As a result I'd use the command history a lot, muscle memory would automatically hit CTRL-P once I switched to one of my execution terminals. If I'd visited something in the documentation terminal in the meantime, I'd be staring at 'man 2 timer_create' instead of my expected './aesalon --set listen=6421 --set ::debug-shm --set ::debug-interaction'. The third-second or so I'd need to do a sanity check would seriously interrupt my train of thought.
It's neat, and I can see why people like it. But for my particular one use-case of terminals/shells, it was annoying. Took me about a week before I realized just how much it was slowing me down and disabled it.
[I probably should have just set up another zsh configuration for those particular terminals, but enough years with bash have trained me, I guess, to not expect it from my shell.]
I'm on the fish mailing list and it has been well received by current contribs and the original author. I expect that the two forks will be one at some point.
If you run chsh and get error "/usr/local/bin/fish: non-standard shell" simply add /usr/local/bin/fish to /etc/shells. Just to save you a Google search :)
a. Superb readline colouring. Nonexistent commands are shown in red, commands that exist and are on PATH in green. Unclosed string literals become obvious.
b. A history search that is orders of magnitude better that Ctrl-r in Bash. (Though oh-my-zsh has the history-substring-search plugin which provides this functionality.)
c. Features work out of the box, fish helps you avoid managing a .zshrc equivalent file.
d. Tab completion offers hints. If I type l<tab><tab>, I get:
leaftoppm (Convert Interleaf image format to a portable anymap)
less (Opposite of more)
lessecho (Expand metacharacters)
lessfile ("input preprocessor" for less.)
lesskey (Specify key bindings for less)
lesspipe ("input preprocessor" for less.)
lexgrog (Parse header information in man pages)
(These summaries are the first lines of the man pages.)
2: I've only seen it crash on me once, which matches my experience with zsh. YMMV.
I used fish exclusively for a number of years, but eventually moved back to something sh-compatible. Too many wrapper scripts assume this.
1) I don't know. I haven't dug that far into zsh, I didn't like it on the surface. Or rather I love both surface and depth of fish enough that I haven't yet investigated zsh.
I tried fish a few years ago, but stopped for some reason that I can't remember. I will try again, and will either keep using it, or will remember why I stopped in the first place.
batman@batman ~/D/S/rails> alias foo="cd ~/"
fish: Could not expand string '$tmp[2]'
/usr/local/share/fish/functions/alias.fish (line 19): set body $tmp[2]
^
in function 'alias',
called on standard input,
with parameter list 'foo=cd ~/'
Makes me wonder what else I'll have to relearn to use fish. Can someone tell me if it's worth the effort?
Edit: didn't take me long to find something worse. I defined my aliases as functions, but apparently fish executes all functions when it sources the file? By putting this function in:
(The usual way a fish user would add this function would be to put a file 'foo.fish' in ~/.config/fish/functions, or to use 'funced fish' to create one interactively.)
As for your infinite loop - fish certainly does not execute all functions when it sources the file. I wasn't able to reproduce your problem. Can you explain how you added this function?
That infinite loop thing is a bug for sure, it shouldn't do that! I have defined that type of function to jump to the directories of current projects - that should work.
It gives me great joy every time a new command-line-related project is released (or, as in this case, gets a major update). I will dedicate a few hours of my weekend to take this for a thorough spin!
Welcome to our fork of the fish shell, a command line shell like bash. Its working name is fishfish, but I hope eventually it will just be fish! (http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/beta.html)
Why does xargs under fish not accept {} as a replstr like it does with bash?
find . | xargs -I {} grep pat {}
On OS X fish this gives "xargs: replstr may not be empty" and on Linux fish I get "xargs: command too long". Using % as the replstr for example does work though.
The beauty of fish is that it handles lists much better than bash - it kind of has xargs "baked in". If I understand the example correctly, it finds every file under the current directory and greps for "pat" in each file.
In fish you could do this:
grep pat (find .)
... or this:
for i in (find .)
grep pat $i
end
The first example would work correctly in fish, but AFAIK it wouldn't work in bash. The is because every line from the command substitution is automatically escaped and quoted in fish. The small drawback is that a symbol-heavy commandline sometimes needs a few extra \ escapes - the power to handle lists of lines (i.e. lines from stdin or from command substitution) is bought for a little extra escaping. And it's a good deal IMO.
And the for loop in fish is so elegant and convenient that it's worth using for small random stuff.
(Everything I say is pending that I understand the find/xargs/grep example!)
I'm not sure why the recommended replacement string to use with xargs's -I is "{}". I just use "XXX" as the replacement string and stop worrying about how the shell is interpreting metacharacters in this particular case:
I just tried it out, I use zsh and don't really look for replacement, but my first impression is that things are much more snappy and significantly faster in fish. I liked how help opened browser, even though I was startled a little bit.
This bug is actually fixed with my changes (see the release notes at http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/release_notes.html). The maximum history length is now 250k unique items, with an LRU discard policy. A full history would be around 15 MB.
Processing time is one concern. fish doesn't do anything as clumsy as keeping the entire file in memory, but scanning a large history file can still add up.
But the larger concern is writing it out. fish saves its history atomically by writing an entirely new file to disk, and swapping it in. You may not notice a 100 MB file, but you would probably notice a frequent 100 MB write!
Disks are big, but I think 100MB is maybe a bit excessive...even 10MB gives you 40k lines of history, at 256 bytes per line, and that is a conservative estimate.
100 MB is indeed small but there are privacy concerns with storing hundreds of thousands of lines of history. Do you really want every command you've typed for the last several years to be visible to anyone with physical access to your box? It could contain clear-text passwords to other machines.
I'd be happy with 100 MB as a maximum size but there should also be time-based limits, like remove anything from history that is older than a few months.
The package doesn't work on Debian testing/unstable/experimental: fish: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by fish)
(I am running GLIB 2.13).
I tried compiling from source, but I am clearly missing dependencies. So far, I had to install:
libncurses5-dev, gettext, xsel, libxt-dev (alternatively, I could use --without-xsel and ignore these last two depends). You may want to add this to the project somewhere.
At any rate, I am looking forward to giving this a try.
Maybe you already know this, but glibc and glib are two entirely different libraries. (The similarity in their names is unfortunate.) So be precise when asking for help.
Whoa. Just installed it and it's beautiful. I'm most surprised by fish_config which fires up a webserver to set config information -- awesome, really awesome.
Unfortunately I can't try this right now, but do suggestions support something like taking only part of the suggestion? I.e. move left/right from cursor into the suggestion instead of writing. Shift+Arrow would work as expected, thus allowing quickly using part of the suggestion and writing the rest out if needed. It seems to be a better solution than deleting things from the end.
You can put this stuff in your ~/.config/fish/config.fish .
There's a useful set of completions and utilities at https://github.com/zmalltalker/fish-nuggets with a variety of forks that add and remove various things. If nothing else, it's a pretty solid starting point.
This is missing the point of a shell by a mile. Extra features are nice. As an extra. Preferably on top of a rock solid platform that works everywhere, on everything, under any conditions. Same reason your PC boots in 16 bit real mode.
Isn't this entire shell an extra? I wouldn't replace bash with it, it seems more like a nicer interactive frontend but you could always drop down to bash if it didn't work for something. Sort of like KDE being a more fully-featured frontend to X, but you can drop back to Fluxbox if you want to test X without all the gizmos.
Your PC boots in 16 bit real mode because Intel is too locked into x86 to get rid of legacy modes and instructions. A proper architecture starts in its intended mode.
But I agree, adding all this fluff to a shell is a bit much. I use bash and keep ls colors disabled.
When using auto-completion is there a way not to use arrow keys? Especially when completing a match it seems like I need to use the right arrow key. I would prefer not to use arrow keys at all, but use something like CTRL+(HJKL).
Well, the normal tab-based autocompletion works like you'd expect. You can go backwards in history the same way you do with the up arrow by using CTRL+P, and CTRL+N is the same as down arrow.
I've never used anything besides bash before. I use a terminal a lot, but don't really do anything fancy so I thought switching would be a waste of time. Reading the features in fish though made me want to give it a whirl.
How to I remove it? I set fish as default, but I realized that none of my scripts in .bash_profile worked... and it's too much work to rewrite everything again.
No. I prefer its syntax, but since it is different from anything else I find it hard to remember. So I write my scripts in bash but use fish at the command line. Best of both.
you could always put "set editing-mode vi" in your ~/.inputrc .. this has the advantage of affecting all programs which use readline, gnuplot, python shell, mysql etc.. I also put
I just tried fish for the first time, and it couldn't do the very first thing I tried to do, which was source my .zshrc. It doesn't have 'export', has some kind of nonstandard syntax for 'alias', and that was enough to get me to give up.
Since there are many fish fanboys here, and since it seems like it would be cool if it worked, I'm hoping someone can tell me the simple obvious thing I should have done. Can you help?
llambda|13 years ago
[1] http://fishshell.com/
qznc|13 years ago
g3orge|13 years ago
mhansen|13 years ago
Valid executables are colored green, as you type. Invalid commands are red, as you type. Valid files are underlined, as you type.
Like the carpenter who can feels the feedback of the grain of the wood through the handle of his plane can adjust his technique as he planes, fish shell lets me 'feel' the programs and files I'm working with through the shell.
And that makes me happy.
StavrosK|13 years ago
If fishfish is more stable, I'll switch in a heartbeat.
uggedal|13 years ago
ralfd|13 years ago
http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/
zedshaw|13 years ago
I think my favorite feature was that history was instantly shared among all your open fish instances.
ethereal|13 years ago
Oftentimes my execution lines are somewhat long -- enabling/disable debugging info in certain sections of the program while tracing programs, etc, and I'd not want to type them out continuously. As a result I'd use the command history a lot, muscle memory would automatically hit CTRL-P once I switched to one of my execution terminals. If I'd visited something in the documentation terminal in the meantime, I'd be staring at 'man 2 timer_create' instead of my expected './aesalon --set listen=6421 --set ::debug-shm --set ::debug-interaction'. The third-second or so I'd need to do a sanity check would seriously interrupt my train of thought.
It's neat, and I can see why people like it. But for my particular one use-case of terminals/shells, it was annoying. Took me about a week before I realized just how much it was slowing me down and disabled it.
[I probably should have just set up another zsh configuration for those particular terminals, but enough years with bash have trained me, I guess, to not expect it from my shell.]
mybuddymichael|13 years ago
ch0wn|13 years ago
http://fishshell.com/
mixmastamyk|13 years ago
0x0|13 years ago
amix|13 years ago
bstpierre|13 years ago
What I want to know:
1. In what specific ways is it better than zsh?
2. Is it absolutely, rock-solid stable?
Wilfred|13 years ago
a. Superb readline colouring. Nonexistent commands are shown in red, commands that exist and are on PATH in green. Unclosed string literals become obvious.
b. A history search that is orders of magnitude better that Ctrl-r in Bash. (Though oh-my-zsh has the history-substring-search plugin which provides this functionality.)
c. Features work out of the box, fish helps you avoid managing a .zshrc equivalent file.
d. Tab completion offers hints. If I type l<tab><tab>, I get:
(These summaries are the first lines of the man pages.)2: I've only seen it crash on me once, which matches my experience with zsh. YMMV.
I used fish exclusively for a number of years, but eventually moved back to something sh-compatible. Too many wrapper scripts assume this.
adamc|13 years ago
calinet6|13 years ago
I couldn't agree more. We've been using shells from the 80's for far too long.
AnthonBerg|13 years ago
Maybe you could tell us? Here's a pretty good article on fish by its original author: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2005/12/linux-...
icarus127|13 years ago
eru|13 years ago
christiangenco|13 years ago
buster|13 years ago
Now it's time to change to fishfish and decide what's best suited for me! :)
edit: Also, i am disappointed that the ASCII-art fish on the frontpage is actually a picture and not ascii :(
egonschiele|13 years ago
Edit: didn't take me long to find something worse. I defined my aliases as functions, but apparently fish executes all functions when it sources the file? By putting this function in:
I was able to send fish into an infinite loop.ridiculous_fish|13 years ago
fish doesn't have aliases, only functions. 'alias' is itself a function, which looks like it has a bug. I filed https://github.com/ridiculousfish/fishfish/issues/48 to track this.
(The usual way a fish user would add this function would be to put a file 'foo.fish' in ~/.config/fish/functions, or to use 'funced fish' to create one interactively.)
As for your infinite loop - fish certainly does not execute all functions when it sources the file. I wasn't able to reproduce your problem. Can you explain how you added this function?
Thanks!
AnthonBerg|13 years ago
That infinite loop thing is a bug for sure, it shouldn't do that! I have defined that type of function to jump to the directories of current projects - that should work.
pooriaazimi|13 years ago
eru|13 years ago
gurraman|13 years ago
mapleoin|13 years ago
Welcome to our fork of the fish shell, a command line shell like bash. Its working name is fishfish, but I hope eventually it will just be fish! (http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/beta.html)
happyfreud|13 years ago
Why can't a better interactive history go hand in hand with something like "sudo !!"?
ash|13 years ago
herdrick|13 years ago
AnthonBerg|13 years ago
In fish you could do this:
... or this: The first example would work correctly in fish, but AFAIK it wouldn't work in bash. The is because every line from the command substitution is automatically escaped and quoted in fish. The small drawback is that a symbol-heavy commandline sometimes needs a few extra \ escapes - the power to handle lists of lines (i.e. lines from stdin or from command substitution) is bought for a little extra escaping. And it's a good deal IMO.And the for loop in fish is so elegant and convenient that it's worth using for small random stuff.
(Everything I say is pending that I understand the find/xargs/grep example!)
rcthompson|13 years ago
nikkaelle|13 years ago
desireco42|13 years ago
herdrick|13 years ago
History file should apply some kind of maximum history length
Fine, but the default needs to be large, like 100MB. Disks are big now. I hope ridiculousfish agrees.
ridiculous_fish|13 years ago
This bug is actually fixed with my changes (see the release notes at http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/release_notes.html). The maximum history length is now 250k unique items, with an LRU discard policy. A full history would be around 15 MB.
Processing time is one concern. fish doesn't do anything as clumsy as keeping the entire file in memory, but scanning a large history file can still add up.
But the larger concern is writing it out. fish saves its history atomically by writing an entirely new file to disk, and swapping it in. You may not notice a 100 MB file, but you would probably notice a frequent 100 MB write!
james4k|13 years ago
oofabz|13 years ago
I'd be happy with 100 MB as a maximum size but there should also be time-based limits, like remove anything from history that is older than a few months.
nickpresta|13 years ago
(I am running GLIB 2.13).
I tried compiling from source, but I am clearly missing dependencies. So far, I had to install:
libncurses5-dev, gettext, xsel, libxt-dev (alternatively, I could use --without-xsel and ignore these last two depends). You may want to add this to the project somewhere.
At any rate, I am looking forward to giving this a try.
maw|13 years ago
mrgreenfur|13 years ago
rplnt|13 years ago
amjith|13 years ago
shadowfiend|13 years ago
You can put this stuff in your ~/.config/fish/config.fish .
There's a useful set of completions and utilities at https://github.com/zmalltalker/fish-nuggets with a variety of forks that add and remove various things. If nothing else, it's a pretty solid starting point.
Paul_S|13 years ago
I'm quite happy living in the 80s.
archangel_one|13 years ago
jff|13 years ago
But I agree, adding all this fluff to a shell is a bit much. I use bash and keep ls colors disabled.
pcsanwald|13 years ago
fceccon|13 years ago
[1] http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/index.html#tod...
amix|13 years ago
Symmetry|13 years ago
siteshwar|13 years ago
scribblemacher|13 years ago
herdrick|13 years ago
eru|13 years ago
albertzeyer|13 years ago
That brings me to the question: What is different in this fork? Is it worth to use this fork or should I stick to the original?
TazeTSchnitzel|13 years ago
fersho311|13 years ago
shin_lao|13 years ago
fenprace|13 years ago
Ideka|13 years ago
neves|13 years ago
jameswyse|13 years ago
danbmil99|13 years ago
rcthompson|13 years ago
rcthompson|13 years ago
mixmastamyk|13 years ago
unknown|13 years ago
[deleted]
kubov|13 years ago
q_revert|13 years ago
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
in the ~/.inputrc which maps arrow up/down to history search.. more tips here http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Use_vi_shortcuts_in_terminal
zsh has a better vi-mode than most of the shells I've tried, although I can't say I've made a serious attempt at using fish..
the color syntax highlighting implemented in zsh is much slower than the fish equivalent though, and can be quite laggy ime
pnathan|13 years ago
I shall have to give it a try!
xwowsersx|13 years ago
fceccon|13 years ago
sontek|13 years ago
Indianburger42|13 years ago
AnthonBerg|13 years ago
I'm sure you know that that's a joke ... ?
unknown|13 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|13 years ago
[deleted]
Uchikoma|13 years ago
robwgibbons|13 years ago
[deleted]
jmathes|13 years ago
Since there are many fish fanboys here, and since it seems like it would be cool if it worked, I'm hoping someone can tell me the simple obvious thing I should have done. Can you help?
gammarator|13 years ago