The most important feature of every terminal: emoji I will just keep using the default KDE Konsole until the day I die.
Fish is really a pleasant shell, nothing groundbreaking but it’s just nice.
That said, I wouldn’t speak of “bash compatibility” just because another symbol/ operator from bash can now be used in fish (this happens sometimes), but this isn’t for compatibility but rather so that you don’t need to learn the fish equivalent. Fish has a different syntax from bash (e.g. command substitution doesn’t use
, nodoin for loops…) so they’ll never be compatible. There are bash compatible shells out there (I guess zsh, dash and probably oil?), but fish isn’t and doesn’t try to be.(I guess zsh, dash and probably oil?)
zsh doesn’t even share var eval syntax with bash (
${(P)foo}vs.${!foo})Yeah, I wasn’t sure there, the question mark was supposed to apply to all shells…
I mean, it feels pretty intentional that the fish team keeps adding syntax compatibility commonly used in bash… 🤷🏻♂️
Which personally as a fish user focused on the user friendliness of fish as an interactive shell, I really appreciate- it being less likely users have to worry about syntax differences while keeping the better scripting language design is really nice.
Not sure theres any good way to describe what they’ve been doing other than “improving compatibility”. Is that not what theyre doing?
These additions are about user familiarity, not inter-shell compatibility is my point. Fish and bash are fundamentally incompatible. Just because they share keywords doesn’t mean they’re compatible. You wouldn’t say Rust got Python compatible just because it introduced a keyword or a concept from it.
Fish is now my go to shell on any system. I once was a die hard zsh/oh-my-zsh user but man running that combo on NixOS was a slog. But Fish has all the stuff I had to use plugins for with zsh right out of the box. faster too.
Yeah, fish is a very comfortable shell in all regards. The standard installation does basically about 90% of what you typically want, probably more. Just very sensible in all aspects
fish isn’t and doesn’t try to be
And it’s better for it. I’ll say it.
Fish may be a little bit more verbose sometimes, but it trades in terseness for legibility and maintainability. I’ll come back to my uncommented scripts 6 months later and I can follow along no problem, fix or add whatever I need with minimal changes. There’s less spaghetti. More doing, less manual reading to check syntax. Love fish.
I’m not the biggest fan of bash either, there’s a reason I use fish, though I also like elvish for interactive use (though it’s rather young all things considered) and in maybe going to use YSH for my next script project as that shell is very small (2MB or so) and yet makes sense.
2 MB is every small indeed. Is there a reason you need such a small binary? Some kind of embedded scenario? Small device? RAM is expensive? 😅
No, but I feel bad when I need to deploy a big package for a bit of scripting.
For example, nushell is about 160 MB installed… which I find a bit much. It’s fine on my desktop, but I also have machines where this would be a significant addition.
this is my first time hearing of fish and that phrase confused me. its badly worded. i am not a fan of bash so i am excited to try this out.
I love fish. :) I use it on all but my production systems. And whenever I have to do anything on my production systems, I really miss it.
