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Comment by earthscienceman | Hacker News Reader

It's only tangential but switching to fish shell made me about 3 times more productive. Being able to easily recall commands, to have completions displayed as I type, and to have interactivity be a first class citizen of the environment... made working in the shell so so so so much nicer.

Fish has its own quirks, some of which seem unnecessary, but it was a godsend. There is definitely still room for improvement of the old tools, a. lot. of. room.

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I switched from fish to zsh once I found this plugin:

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

Now zsh feels just like fish, but with bash-compatible syntax (which was the main day-to-day problem I had with fish, otherwise it's fine, but except for the auto-suggestions I didn't really use any special fish features).

I was always reluctant to change my shell, but recently I switched to fish and It’s been a pleasure from day one. I wish I did it sooner.

I have used fish for many years and always been puzzled why it is not more popular. If you want an easy and effective shell that gets out of your way then it is should have been an obvious choice.

Do you have any thoughts on why people don’t try it out? Where u also reluctant?

In my case it was the fact that fish's scripting language is incompatible with bash's that made me switch back to zsh (after a few years of using fish). It's not a show stopper (otherwise I had switched back earlier), but there's been a dose of small daily frictions because of that.

I try not to use nonstandard software unless it's something I spend a lot of time on. The shell became very important to my work recently, and only then I started looking for alternatives to bash and zsh.

I am a huge fan of fish. Oil shell seems kind of different in aim from fish. Fish is trying primarily to be a great interactive shell and have code which is easy to understand but not necessarily compact of efficient to write. But for me it doesn’t matter. For longer things I use Julia or Go anyway.

Absolutely, hence "tangential". I was only hoping to lend credence to the idea that reinventing things is a good idea with a parallel example. I'm not the target audience of oil shell but I wish anyone who takes on something like that all the luck.

It has always baffled me the pushback that is given when someone works on projects like these. As if trying to do better isn't worth it.

It always surprises me that people get so much productivity gain out of their editors, shells and keyboards and such.

I write maybe a few dozen lines of code on a good day.

Well. We all do different kinds of work. I'm a scientist, i spend all day looking at and parsing data in a zillion formats. Not to mention writing papers in latex. My productivity directly depends on my ability to ingest and make sense of text files and code and every day is different. A more efficient shell... or more importantly a shell that frees up brain space for other tasks... makes a huge difference.

I often work with colleagues who ask how j get results so fast. They're very surprised when I say "remote emacs and a solid foundation with shell workflows".

When everything you work with is a text file, getting efficient with the shell just makes sense. Ask a carpenter about their tools and organization and you'll get a similar response.

(Fish doesn't make me 3x more productive, but...) I think a good analogy would be having sharp tools. If you don't have to exert yourself to do simple things, then menial tasks use less mental energy which you can save for your actual work.

Fish manages to pull this off without _any_ configuration burden (I use it completely stock), which is exciting because usually to benefit from shortcuts or macros or other "productivity hacks" you have to become a power user.

their take on config is unique:

> Every configuration option in a program is a place where the program is too stupid to figure out for itself what the user really wants, and should be considered a failure of both the program and the programmer who implemented it.

https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html#configurabili...

If you're working a lot in the terminal, than fish's convenient auto-suggestion mechanism is really quite a game changer, and it really "feels" 3x more productive because the prediction is pretty good (each directory has its own command history which fish checks first for matches). It's like replacing a traditional search box which only shows exact matches after you hit Enter with a fuzzy-search-box which immediately displays a most likely match while you're typing.

There are plugins for zsh (and maybe other shells) which emulate this feature though.

I am curious what you are doing with the rest of the day? Planning? Meetings?

In my experience, reading code.

Figuring out what lines to write, mostly.

How does fish compare to zsh? I just switched from bash to zsh and am loving it.

Fish’s strength is in having good defaults that makes it work well out of the box. Fish’s downside is not being POSIX compatible [1] though its creators would argue they deliberately avoided POSIX weaknesses.

If you already have Zsh configured well then Fish probably wouldn’t offer a huge advantage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_(Unix_shell)#Bash/fish_tr...

For a good default config of zsh I highly recommend oh-my-zsh[0]. I've been using it for years and it's amazing.

[0]: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

Fish is a bit like the Mac of shells. Stuff just works and its easy to use while flexible. Lots of little details are well polished.

The downsides are similar to Mac. Less standard/compatible with other stuff. Zsh seems more like a traditional shell. Meaning it is far more complex. Fish really aims to keep simplicity.

I have used Fish for many years and swear by it but I am also not the kind of guy who writes long shell scripts. I use regular programming languages for that. For me fish is mainly about having a shell that works well in interactive use.

I completely agree with this.

I recommend people Zsh: it's very familiar, scripts copied from the internet will most probably work and they have lots of flexibility to adjust it to their needs.

I personally have a Mac with Fish installed, I don't enjoy the process of sharpening my tools, I'm willing to give up flexibility in exchange of great defaults. It's the same reason why after I learned how to use a sharpening stone, I ended up buying an electric knife sharpener.

My least favorite fish quirk is that you cannot use stty to remap Ctrl-C. You need to use stty in another shell, then exec into fish to remap it.

Good news: In the upcoming 3.2 release, fish will be less insistent on resetting terminal modes, so things like this (and enabling flow control) will be possible.

(I'm the fish dev who implemented that)

Why do you remap Ctrl-C?

Why wouldn't I remap ctrl-c? It is the shortcut for copy. The letter c is nowhere in the word interrupt.

Interesting, it seems a 3x productivity boost to all programmers and admins would be a no brainer for the industry.

If all programmers and admins had the same needs then that would be a logical conclusion. But we don't, so I'll stick to ksh.

Not everyone who uses a computer is a programmer or an admin. I can't speak to their needs or what fish provides for them.

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