Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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I think fish's syntax is cleaner, though as others have pointed out, the incompatibility is often not worth it.

Even though it's "sane", I would say it's not "powerful". It's significantly less powerful than bash, e.g. there is a list of missing things here:

https://github.com/pirate/fish-utils/blob/master/README.md

The first one seems like one of the bigger issues: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/159

I have a particular viewpoint since I'm writing a shell for scripting, and I wrote this FAQ. http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html#wh...

But I didn't come up with that list of issues, and I've only used fish a tiny bit.

#159 kind of works with the `string collect` mechanism, although it is indeed not very obvious, compared to bash:

    set file_contents (cat filename | string collect -N)

I understand that this is purely anecdotal, but I'm using fish for quite a long time, I've written a lot of tooling for myself in fish, and I agree that sometimes there are some things which are annoyingly missing from fish (like this multiline variable thing), but I would not say it makes fish significantly less powerful. And these things are sometimes fixed, too.

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