2d ago

Today I found out about fish shell

fish shell

I just found out about fish shell a few moments ago. I switched Konsole on KDE to use it instead of bash and am impressed so far. Might install it on the Pihole eventually. Good stuff, just wanted to share. :)

52 comments

Shellfish aren't kosher
Fish is great. I love how it works by default. I always felt like zsh required too much setup.
Have you also tried nushell? It's great for manipulating data from e.g. .csv or .json files. It works with structured data like so:
- I'm honestly just now finding out about all of these different shells, and prompts! It's amazing, and daunting at the same time!
  Right now, I'm just using fish since it does the little that I need from the terminal. I am a Linux noob/casual, so working with scripts or CSV or JSON files aren't all that important to me. I will take a look at nushell though! :)
- One thing that bothers me about Nushell (even if it doesn't really matter) is honestly just how bloated the table style is, with three columns in each column margin and six columns of enforced line numbers. Why can't it display tables in the same style as regular UNIX commands?
  Another thing that bothered me is that the "blessed" way to parse tables from external commands seems very fragile to me. Iirc the builtin parsing commands work solely off table headers, which are locale dependent for many commands, so a script might appear to work fine but suddenly break if an LC_* environment variable sneaks in somewhere. The size filter trick works nicely for ls, but doing the same thing becomes painful again when using df.
  I also found the script syntax (implicit line continuations, command seperation, etc.) difficult to understand but presumably that's just a matter of familiarity.
  I'll have to give it another try in the future but for now Fish is good enough for me.
- Not OP but I fell instantly in love with fish shell and its design principles.
  I've also tried nushell and its design and ideas are really cool. I'm sure it can be very useful for often handling data in the shell. But as a daily thing it was a bit much for me at the time to transition to. 😅 I'd love to explore more sometime though.
  
  Yes, it takes some getting used to. I still use fish as my default shell and use nu for working with data.
Warning: Setting fish as your login shell may cause issues, such as an incorrect PATH. Some operating systems, including a number of Linux distributions, require the login shell to be Bourne-compatible and to read configuration from /etc/profile. fish may not be suitable as a login shell on these systems.
- Yep, leave the default shell as-is and either set the terminal app to spawn the one you want, or exec fish from the existing shell profile in interactive cases.
  
  All we need, baby, no reason really to make it the default shell for the user.
There is also zsh which has a lot of the great features of fish, especially if parird with something like zimfw.
Another interesting shell is dash
Here's a list of other shells.
- To get most of the good features of fish in zsh you have to install a bunch of plugins. And it’s way slower than fish as well. I used zsh for like 6 years and when I switched to fish (probably in 2018 or 19) I’ve never gone back. Fish is just so much better.
  
  since I switched to NixOS I'm finding this out now. Prior to this every Distro I was on I used zsh/oh my zsh because I'm a dummy and need the autosuggestions, autocomplete, syntax highlighting etc and it was quick, no issues.
  Now that i'm on Nix zsh is slow to get to a prompt. logging in via tty takes 2-5 seconds to hit a prompt, in a terminal about the same. maybe I set up my nix config wrong, I don't know. I'm only loading those three pluggins and I've boiled it down to the autosuggestions and or autocomplete.
  It might just be a conflict with NixOS' auto suggestsions/complete thing (likely is) but if Fish or Nushell has the same 3 features I need because, again, i'm a dummy then I'd happily switch.
  
  And it’s way slower than zsh as well.
  Did you intend to write this part like this?
  
  Had the opposite experience, fish was way slower than zsh for me.
- "zimfw"
  Look at what they need to mimic even a fraction of [fish's] power ☝️
  
  Idk, it could be argued that the ability to add exactly what features you want via plugins might make the shell more minimal and faster. Although most people don't know what they want and just install everything.
I like Fish a lot, it's a good shell.
I gave it a try recently and ended up going back to zsh and plugins that do fish things.
- So you want the features of fish? Why'd you go back to zsh then?
  
  I use fish on a couple of devices, but damn it's frustrating when you want to do a fast and simple bash scripting and it doesn't work. Frankly now I think it would have been better to spend some time to setup zsh.
  
  I considered Fish but decided against it because of POSIX compliance
How does it compare to bash?
I am a relatively casual Linux user (headless Pi-hole and grandma used to use Ubuntu for basic use cases) and have only ever used Bash, that too for relatively simple tasks.
- I do not use bash for anything other than running what a casual Linux user would be running. I like it for the autocomplete functions, and the TAB feature to give you my own reasons! That's all I need in my setup, so it works way better than bash. :)
- If you ever copy paste commands you don't understand (and aren't prepared to take a detour down a rabbit hole to figure out why they didn't work), stick with bash (or zsh).
  Fish isn't "posix compliant" which can make some things work (or not) unexpectedly.
  Don't get me wrong, it's a great shell and there are many reasons people emulate its behaviors in other shells, but I can't recommend it as a "newbie" or "casual user" choice.
  
  I most definitely copy and paste commands that I don't understand. I even use LLMs to help write simple Bash scripts. :)
  I was just curious what the use cases are for this shell as I've only ever used Bash.
- It’s vastly more user friendly than bash, though if you need to write a script and only know bash then you should drop back into bash.

52 comments