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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

For somebody who hasn’t tried it, what are the advantages over something like Oh My Zsh?

I find it has two advantages. One, being quite a sophisticated auto-complete system. I haven't seen anything nearly as polished. The other advantage is it's easy to learn and configure. You can read the short manual and you'll know about every feature and keyboard shortcut that exists.

Fish autocomplete seemed like magic when I first started using it. I does things like autocomplete file paths on the android side of adb sync commands, autocomplete on docker container hashes..

I am a longtime zsh user and tried fish earnestly for a month or so, but gave up because I could not figure out how to ignore certain patterns while auto-completing filenames. For example, I typically edit tex files and I don't want any of the temp files to be suggested as autocomplete suggestions. In zsh, I can write

zstyle ':completion:::(vim|nvim)::files' ignored-patterns '*.(aux|dvi|log|thm|idx|pdf|rel|out|tuo|tui|tuc|tmp|mpo|mpb|mpd|1|keep|pgf|fls|gz|fdb_latexmk)'

(yes, tex generates so many temp files!) I couldn't figure out how to do something similar in fish

It’s a sane scripting language. It encouraged me to automate simple tasks, create handy functions etc. I don’t have to google the for loop syntax every time I need it.

One thing I like about Fish is that it works great out of the box, without needing to install plugins.

it's super fast (autocomplete, arrow up/down) and "looks cool" without any extra configuration.

oh-my-zsh can be quite slow on very powerful machines for very simple tasks. Also having a shell default to most of the features you need makes docs simple compared to the million flags of zsh

Oh my zsh always seemed to add several seconds to shell startup. Fish starts up instantly

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