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Comment by faizmokhtar | Hacker News Reader

I thought fish is the hot new thing

I've been using fish for the past few months and the jury is still out. On one hand, the out of the box behavior and configurability is fantastic, and by default it is very pleasing to the eyes.

On the other hand, on my macOS there was a noticeable lag after I hit enter on a command that is not in bash. I also have very little attention span for figuring out fish's unique function loading system to pimp my shell like I would bash.

For customising the prompt, starship.rs is excellent.

And is my default prompt for PowerShell on Windows 10!

I think fish is great for newcomers or for those who don't really want to mess around with too many settings or plugins.

I'm a fish user, actually. That said, for those on zsh who want some of fish's most prominent user features without leaving, check out zsh-syntax-highlighting[1] and zsh-autosuggestions[2]. These are rather popular so long time users may not benefit from these suggestions.

[1] https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting [2] https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

Interesting. I also used fish for a while after looking at bash alternatives, but ended up with zsh, because fish had some (admittedly minor) inconveniences/bugs, and zsh felt more mature. But very soon I had to install the two extensions you mentioned because my shell felt really incomplete without them after fish.

My journey is the opposite to you, I started with zsh and those two plugins. It's good to have bash like syntax (easy for copy paste from the web), but the slooooooooow startup speed really annoys me, so I give fish a try and now I'm impressed by its speed and feature.

I actually chose fish over zsh since I didn't want to spend time configuring zsh. fish was pretty much okay out of the box apart from colour scheme.

I would find such a lag very irritating, but it's fine on Linux. Using Bash for years and I realized that I could never remember all its corner cases - fish is much easier to fit in the head. And _personally_ I don't need to be POSIX. (The function loading system is pretty simple and makes so much damn sense after years of .profile etc)

I'm on MacOS Catalina, with very pimped up fish config, and I don't see any lag compared to bare-bones bash.

It is. Around these parts, people use “hot new thing” as code for “thing I don’t like” regardless of the thing’s age or actual popularity. It’s not meant to be an actual statement of fact.

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