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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Fish instead and it's much much simpler than configuring ZSH to my liking. It's already good out of the box, without having to carry around any kind of configuration. The only stuff I usually do is to setup `powerline-go` as prompt, and voilà, that's pretty much it.

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I rather liked Fish's zero config approach but I found their handling of the PATH very hard to work with day to day. Perhaps it was just my familiarity with having a bunch of statements to alter the PATH in a config file but it felt very opaque, I always had to look up how to add stuff to the PATH and I had great trouble trying to remove stuff from the PATH.

It's easy once you understand universal global and local variables.

That is a valid issue. Should be remedied in an upcoming release.

Oh wow that's great to hear. Do you have any resources I could reference? A Github issue discussing the intended solution or something?

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/7028

I LOVE the way fish handles PATH. I just modify the $fish_user_paths variable (which is a universal variable) and I don’t have to modify any config files.

E.g. to permanently add `~/.cargo/bin/` to your PATH just do

    set fish_user_paths $fish_user_paths ~/.cargo/bin

once from an interactive shell, and you’re done!

The main drawback for fish is that is not compatible with bash scripting. If you need help with something specific, you can throw out almost all help available online.

I've been thinking about a more fluid way to hybridize these different shells.

I'd like a way to get all the benefits without the cost or any extra required effort for the user.

Some painless master shell program. No epiphanies yet though.

I just have both installed. Fish for interacting and bash for scripting.

I can never understand this complaint. I'm frequently on Windows and use Cygwin.

Do you know what I do?

I use zsh. Let's say I need bash. "bash<Enter>". I'm in bash :-) I need cmd (yup, that can happen). "cmd<Enter>".

I need to run just one command with bash: "bash command<Enter>".

I need to run just one command with cmd: "cmd /c command<Enter>".

These problems are trivially solvable :-)

Switched to fish for daily use a year ago and have only had to fallback to bash maybe 3-4 times for a gnarly command invocation that was bash only.

Same, I use starship[1] as my prompt, it's easy to install and has sane defaults.

[1] https://github.com/starship/starship

I am a happy Fish user, too. The first downside that comes to my head is that if you want to share a script you wrote that you have to translate it to bash first. Much less of an issue if you're using zsh.

I just write my scripts in bash or python, depending on the use case.

Aliases and macros are fish script though.

I'm a zsh user, and I disagree on it not being much of an issue. It is very easy to inadvertently rely on all manner of zsh-specific behaviour in scripts. Short form logic syntax, builtins with different arguments, internal stat/attr/datetime/etc manipulation, my personal favourite $RANDOM behaves differently to bash in subshells, and much more.

zsh does have the emulate builtin available to help with some basic things, but it is still easy to produce scripts littered with zsh'isms.

However, I do use zsh for personal scripts. In fact, I go so heavy on zsh'isms I know I'd need to rewrite things to share them if non-zsh users are an issue. It is easier to keep track of things that way, instead of tripping over the little easily forgotten quirks.

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