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Comment by hestefisk | Hacker News Reader

Long time zsh user here. Any reason one should try out fish?

Coming from ZSH, Fish is a shell that just worked out of the box for me. It did everything ZSH did but I didn't have to touch a single configuration file to make it work. With ZSH I was forced to find all the options I wanted enabled and tuned or had to resort oh-my-zsh or templates from others to get all the good stuff. Managing dotfiles across workstations and servers. With Fish about the only thing I do after installing is set a theme with Git status.

> It did everything ZSH did

... and some additional things that you can't do in zsh without plugins, such as autosuggestions[0].

[0]: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

”Fish is a shell that just worked out of the box for me”

Same here. Fish’s configuration defaults are very well thought out and incredibly smooth. My config.fish is only nine lines.

And when you do want to configure it, you can choose to use either config.fish or the web-based configuration tool. The web tool is very nicely thought out and lets you preview themes and such before you use them.

Yet the thought of a shell with a web interface made me shudder at first. Like those electron based terminal emulators.

It's a python script, using python's http.server. If you're not executing `fish_config` explicitly, nothing is running.

Nice use of the Python http module. Never looked into the function before tbh (didn't expect the server to be running in the shell though). But just did using `funced` (which I just discovered in the changelog, nice feature as well).

It's also great when you need an ad hoc web server:

    python -m http.server

I have started a lot of unsophisticated shell users with Oh My Zsh which works great without any configuration, and is what I use myself.

I can see how its easier to just make sure Fish is installed, but in some situations (NFS home directory mount and zsh already available) it is easier to install oh my zsh in HOME.

https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

With zsh, I can do ~1, ~2 etc to move around a directory stack. Does fish have anything like that?

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Intro/intro_6.html#SEC6

Fish does not include tons of syntactic shortcuts. We try to keep the syntax fairly free of opaque symbols.

You can use `prevd` and `nextd`, or you can use key bindings, like the default alt-left and alt-right bindings.

How do you go to the nth item of the directory stack? Even bash lets you do this:

    $ dirs -v
    0  ~/baz
    1  ~
    2  ~/bar
    3  ~/foo
    4  ~/spam

Then "pushd +3" will take you to ~/foo. This hardly seems "opaque".

That's included, just the `~2` shortcut thing isn't.

Which is included? I couldn't find anything like "dirs -v" in the fish manual. Without that, "pushd +N" isn't very useful.

There's a "dirs" command, which lists the directory stack, and a "cdh" command, which lists your directory history.

I made a plugin for that. It works well enough for my needs. https://github.com/danhper/fish-fastdir

I'm not sure how nice zsh is by default, but out of the box Fish is nice, it's just not compatible with bash scripts. I think of it as a really nice shell for terminal use, I wouldn't write "fish" scripts personally, not as portable.

I mostly like that it tells me when my commands are wrong or when it autocompletes (usually hints are based on the directory you're in which is nice).

I tried zsh ages back and if I remember correctly you had to configure it yourself to get to such a point.

Note I only install fish in systems I fully own, I rather not confuse coworkers by using another shell. Also forces me to be more careful when in a production system.

I was a long time zsh user too until a few months ago, when i tried to configure zsh line completion for a new tool. After a few hours of reading and trying I looked at how this other new she'll did it. Found the doc clear and the implementation clean, was able to solve my problem in no time. Havn't looked back although I'm not a big fan of breaking sh compatibility for many futile things, I welcome the simpler design.

Abbreviations!!! No more aliases, abbreviations are the killer feature. See my other comment in this post for an example.

Also, inline function creation, editing and saving are also pretty killer. I make way more one-day use functions than on bash with fish.

I just switched back to zsh after using fish for a while. I found fish nice, but found the lack of POSIX compliance annoying when I wanted to modify things in my rc. I also just like the (oh-my-)zsh defaults better.

Haven't tried 3.0 yet but it had some gotchas back then that I switched back to zsh when zsh could just do all fish could do with enough customization but kept using fish for shell scripting as it looked more sane than the bash like syntax that is ancient.

I use fish for years but never explored it deeply. Mostly I choose it "just works". Auto-completion based on history is great, vim mode seemed kind of silly at first but after I started using it just feels very natural.

There is basically no configuration. It's set it and forget it.

At the very least it is a very well designed piece of software. Even if only for that reason, I would recommend taking a look.

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