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Comment by aequitas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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”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

> 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

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

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