Both of which literally start by referencing fish in their respective READMEs.
And where zsh requires plugins to get these, fish has these by default. Perhaps unsurprising as fish stands for Friendly Interactive SHell. As such, the niceties don’t stop there.
Basically, if you want a no-nonsense shell that gets pretty much out of your way and comes with excellent defaults right of the gate, then you simply can’t go wrong with fish.
Take this from someone that stubbornly tried to bend bash to my will with stuff like ble.sh (link) and later zsh with zsh-quickstart-kit, but to no avail… It always caused more trouble than it was worth. And when I finally gave in and tried fish, it was pure bliss from the get-go. The rest has been history… Fish has literally become the first thing I install on all my systems.
Note, however, that (as per fish’ documentation) you shouldn’t change your login shell to fish. This blogpost by a CoreOS engineer goes over it in more length.
I could be wrong, but searching for “zsh” on GitHub and sorting it by most stars should be a pretty good metric. ↩︎
exact same experience I had. used bash for years, got so tired of it, switched to zsh with plugins and it was amazing, but so slow to load. Finally got tired of that and tried fish and it’s just zsh, but … good …
I’ve never had issues with fish as login shell though. Probably niche OSes
It’s just a very nice shell that’s conceptually very close to common shells like bash and others while it has a nicer syntax than those. All in all very reasonable and rather evolutionary than revolutionary. So the learning curve is rather flat compared to shells like nu or elvish
For me is it’s awesome, out of the box, syntax highlighting, auto-suggestions/auto-complete and the up arrow history function (that includes substrings).
zero downsides and all upsides? like, zsh with plugins is just fish out of the box. I used zsh for a long long time (and several other shells), but with the plugins you want to have you immediately hit long loading times to actually start your shell. and then when it’s finally loaded it’s still a worse experience than fish.
Why do people seem to especially like fish?
I suppose it’s pretty easy to see why when you consider what the most[1] popular plugins are for the popular shell
zsh:Both of which literally start by referencing
fishin their respective READMEs.And where
zshrequires plugins to get these,fishhas these by default. Perhaps unsurprising asfishstands for Friendly Interactive SHell. As such, the niceties don’t stop there.Basically, if you want a no-nonsense shell that gets pretty much out of your way and comes with excellent defaults right of the gate, then you simply can’t go wrong with
fish.Take this from someone that stubbornly tried to bend
bashto my will with stuff likeble.sh(link) and laterzshwith zsh-quickstart-kit, but to no avail… It always caused more trouble than it was worth. And when I finally gave in and triedfish, it was pure bliss from the get-go. The rest has been history… Fish has literally become the first thing I install on all my systems.Note, however, that (as per
fish’ documentation) you shouldn’t change your login shell tofish. This blogpost by a CoreOS engineer goes over it in more length.I could be wrong, but searching for “zsh” on GitHub and sorting it by most stars should be a pretty good metric. ↩︎
exact same experience I had. used bash for years, got so tired of it, switched to zsh with plugins and it was amazing, but so slow to load. Finally got tired of that and tried fish and it’s just zsh, but … good …
I’ve never had issues with fish as login shell though. Probably niche OSes
It’s just a very nice shell that’s conceptually very close to common shells like bash and others while it has a nicer syntax than those. All in all very reasonable and rather evolutionary than revolutionary. So the learning curve is rather flat compared to shells like nu or elvish
For me is it’s awesome, out of the box, syntax highlighting, auto-suggestions/auto-complete and the up arrow history function (that includes substrings).
Completions, plugins, and themes built in. It’s fine. I still use bash for scripting but fish for interactive terminals is nice with little effort.
zero downsides and all upsides? like, zsh with plugins is just fish out of the box. I used zsh for a long long time (and several other shells), but with the plugins you want to have you immediately hit long loading times to actually start your shell. and then when it’s finally loaded it’s still a worse experience than fish.