Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus

Sorry, but what is fish?

Too afraid to ask.jpg

They call that out as an improvement with the rust switch. You can now just scp a single binary over and have fish without even needing to install it

Same. That's why I stick with zsh, even though I know Fish has better features, and I would really like to learn fish. I log into many different VMs every day, they all use Bash, some also have zsh. None of them have Fish.

I only have to "quotes" strings that contains globs. The rest mostly work or use the newer/recommanded way to do things for posix shells.

But I must admit, I only use it interactively. For scripts I #!/bin/{,ba}sh. I will use something else once it won some/most the distro preinstalls (either nu, elvish, fish, but for now it's sadly python).

As long as you use bash in your shebang you won't know the difference. Fish even has conventions for applying environment variables to be available in both shells. I've used Fish for a couple years and my biggest gripe (which is still minor) is that command snippets off the Internet don't always work. In those cases I either switch to bash temporarily or fix the command to work in Fish.

This is what I do.
Fish for daily usage and when I need to write a script or use a snippet from the web, I drop to bash for a sec. Totally worth it.

Yes, Fish excels at being an interactive shell.

I felt that way too, but testing it for a few days on one device changed my mind. Their pitch rings true, it has so many basic QoL features that make you wonder why this wasn't added to bash two decades ago.

For me, the only bash->fish gripe I've had was it took me a little while to get used to having to put quotes around URLs with a ? to stop it trying to wildcard, but again, their rationale makes perfect sense and really I admit it was bad for bash to simply accept that string in the first place.

I just set Fish as the shell that my terminal emulator should launch. The actual default/system shell can stay Bash. And then, yeah, if you put Bash into the shebang, all the scripts will run with it, and you can just execute bash in your Fish shell at any point to drop into a Bash shell.

Occasionally, I'll realize some syntax discrepancy where I've kind of learned it the Fish way, but because I'm only using Fish interactively, there's really not a ton of syntax that I'm interacting with.

And yeah, ultimately I find it well worth it. In particular the history-based auto-suggestions are really useful. People will ask me what that command was again and I'll start typing into my shell and it just pulls out exactly what I wanted in quite a lot of cases.

Same but I hate cleaning the tank. So messy and smelly.

Openhub also says it's "mostly written in javascript".

But in all seriousness: The port wasn't the greatest time for new contributors, because there wasn't a lot of feature work or cleanup happening.

So I'd expect more now.

The port isn't even shipping everywhere, give it like a year, then check the stats