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Comment by tut-urut-utut | Hacker News Reader

It may be better bash, but it's just an incremental improvement, no more. It still follows the same philosophy as bash.

On the other hand, fish shell feels like a bash rethought and optimized for interactive use. It's now my daily driver on all of my Linux and Windows machines (msys2 port). After using it only for interactive sessions, I also started to write my utilities in fish, which is a breath of fresh air compared to both bash and zsh.

The only place where I still use bash is when I need to write a script that needs to be shared with others, everything else is now fish.

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Within 30 seconds of installing fish, I shouted, "How the hell do I disable these annoying suggestions?! This is worse than Clippy!" So I searched fish's docs and learned that it wasn't possible to disable the suggestions! The fish docs state, "Configurability is the root of all evil"[1]. As an Emacs user, this was the most offensive thing I've ever read, which is saying a lot because I once read a work of erotic Star Trek fan fiction about a love triangle involving Dr. Crusher, Wesley and Worf.

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

not the link I was hoping for ;)

hahaha same

If you don't want suggestions and completions, fish is definitely not the right shell for you !

That said fish is quite configurable¹, it just have pleasant (well maybe not to you) default that you can change.

1- The ssettings are mostly listed there https://fishshell.com/docs/current/interactive.html

I have to admit, I’m not surprised the fish user would footnote with (an unclosed) ¹ on HN. :) As for me, I prefer the predictability of [1] and /bin/bash.

Likewise, I don't use fish for exactly this reason. It seems extremely fine tuned to meet exactly the preferences of its developers, and eschews all further configurability. The Clippy comparison is brilliant, by the way, pretty much summarizes my exact feelings about the suggestions.

I ended up back on zsh. It's a real shame, because fish adds quite a lot in terms of improved subshell syntax and intelligent string manipulation.

Seems like someone should have been able to disable the suggestions using a plugin or something, given that IIRC fish has a plugin interface. But as far as I can tell no such thing exists.

I use fish as my default user interactive shell but I still agree with you. I despise this philosophy of "configurability is the root of all evil" coming from fish and "every preference has a cost" coming from GNOME.

I think these projects are extremely opinionated and they will inevitably drive a lot of users away. Both fish and GNOME strive to provide "good" defaults out of the box but those defaults will never appeal to everyone. I ended up liking fish but I still despise GNOME and everything related to it.

The advantage of that, though, is that you can still benefit from the many "how do I do X in bash" posts on various fora, Stack Exchange, etc. With the more esoteric shells you have a much smaller community.

It's very infrequent that you're doing something truly novel with your interactive shell.

For scripts, you can still use bash or zsh or python or whatever you want.

> you can still use bash or zsh or python

I prefer to keep my utilities scripting and interactive shell the same. That way I don't have to keep two sets of gotchas in my head, and don't accidentally use the wrong syntax in one place or the other sometimes leading to confusing misbehaviours.

While I don't mix bash/zsh/sh/... I will consider python/node/other if I need specific things that they do well or I'm making something more than a simple tool or automation (for which bash is either underkill or just thoroughly unsuited). They are sufficiently different that I'm not going to cause myself the sort of mix-up I might with flipping between shell scripting syntaxes.

The really cool thing about shell scripts is that they are just a saved version of your interactions with the ability to edit and refine later. If you stop using the shell interactively you've just lost the main advantage of using it for scripting.

That's a very good point. I have stuck with it because I am comfortable with it, but I have been wanting to spend some quality time with these alternative shells for a while. Have you tried Elvish? I am particularly curious about that one, because it seems like the primary Fish "competitor", but seems comparatively a lot less popular.

I also use fish on basically every linux machine, desktop or server, but I've also tried elvish for a bit. My shell scripts are still mostly bash or even POSIX though, because I haven't rewritten them yet, or they're setup scripts that should work right after the install without installing an additional shell first.

I'll admit that I haven't really dug into scripting with elvish, because I quickly abandoned it again.

My main reason for leaving elvish again was the good syntax completion in fish. Yes, you can create your own completions in elvish and they'll probably be just as good, but that takes time and I ultimately decided not to bother with it.

> it's just an incremental improvement, no more. It still follows the same philosophy as bash.

It is actually the other way round, with bash being an incremental improvement over zsh. Starting from v3, bash has adopted many features that zsh had had for a long time.

Both, bash and zsh, are incremental improvements over the Korn shell.

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