So I’ve been using Linux now for a while, and am looking to migrate my dev environment to vim and spend more time in the command line. I’m fairly comfortable with bash but by no means an expert. I’ve used zsh with some minor customization but just recently learned about fish. I’d love to hear people’s opinions.
I use fish because I have better things to do than tweak my shell configuration and debug shell plugins.
When I tried oh-my-zsh and prezto (I think?) they came with tons of plugins that performed badly and made it hard to get things done (specifically, they ran git status synchronously on every new prompt, which does not work well in a moderately large repo). Fish had similar features but wasn’t horribly slow, so I use it.
I’m also using fish shell, it find it very user friendly and extremely practical. It gathers all the programs options which you can see when pressing Tab and together with the fzf plugin for history and file search it becomes a very smart shell to use.
I use Fish shell and while it is pretty nice on its own, the fact that it is non-standard does cause problems. Many times you will search for something online and you’ll find nice bash results, which either you will have to execute directly in bash or modify to work correctly in Fish.
I don’t think all of Fish’s design choices are the best, either. But for an OOTB experience, it is nicer than either Bash or Zsh.
Only right answer is of course TCSH. Not much documentation and support, ancient but still receives new bugs in 2021 (on Debian), but attackers hate it! (I love it)
My real suggestion is to learn zsh and fish (and bash). Try using them for all your purposes and in the end you will automatically find the one (or more of them) that suits you best and that you like most for your daily tasks.
I like zsh with oh-my-zsh and Powerlevel10k. This gives me a clear indication of which system I am on and remains POSIX-compliant.
The biggest deal breaker for me for shells like fish are the they are not POSIX-compliant and I need to use remote systems regularly. Doesn’t make sense to use something with a different syntax to me.
I moved to the fish shell a while ago and I love it, everything I need works OOB. I don’t understand people complaining about the different sintax for scripts, this is a non issue, just use #!/bin/bash at the start of your script and it will use bash, or just execute directly with “bash script.sh”.
I don’t understand people complaining about the different sintax for scripts, this is a non issue…
I have a two major reasons:
Adding another shell syntax adds unnecessary cognitive load and context switching. If I were to use a non-POSIX shell, I’d have to remember another, highly domain-specific language, in addition to BASH/ZSH/SH and need to context switch when writing and debugging shell scripts. Instead, I can spend the mental energy on writing code, and learning new languages and tools.
Most remote *nix systems run BASH or another POSIX-compliant shell. This introduces additional context switching when administering or debugging remotely.
If I have to switch shells all the time when another shell, zsh has the same functionality as fish, without the switching around, I’ll use that. Not to mention fish causes flatpak to not add Flatpaks to the app menu until restart. Environment variable messes. If I have to install a bunch of other stuff to make fish work, vs make zsh work more nicely, I’ll pick the 2nd one.
bash with ble.sh! I’m a former fish user, and ble.sh replicates all of fish’s quality of life improvements (that I used, at least) and then some, all with a single source command in my .bashrc. And it’s still bash at the end of the day, so online resources to tweak and modify it all still work.
If you want you can install starship, which provides a lot of the nifty prompt customization I see in other people’s zsh configs. I’ve been using it with bash for a few months now and like it a lot.
@Thaurin@zitronen what does it do in addition? For me fzf already replaces some of the keybinds to do history search, directory search, etc. What else is available on the plugin?
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