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Comment by rainingmonkey | Hacker News Reader

> while Fish has some nice out-of-the-box features, they’re all achievable in Zsh with a few lines of plugins.

The point of fish is that there is no configuration required.

You don't have to learn to configure it, you don't have to be part of "the community" to learn which plugins to use, you'll be able to sit in front of any fish prompt and have it work as expected without having to move dotfiles around.

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That's a cool argument for Fish for beginners. When you spend thousands of hours in a shell that doesn't matter as much. I don't see any benefit for someone who has Zsh set up well, but yes you do have to google once how to configure auto-completion and so on.

Probably little for anyone who has any shell “set up well”. Just if they are tired of spending time tweaking things and would rather more capable out of the box experiences so they can benefit from features added to the core shell without hunting for plugins.

I use Fish, however I also use Vim and do the plugin hunt there. I enjoy it, but I’m glad to not be doing it for both my environments.

Comparing the "plugin hunt" between vim and zsh is a bit much. I use three for Zsh, just syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and fzf-tab. I don't use a Zsh plugin manager.

> The point of fish is that there is no configuration required.

I think it would be more accurate to say that the point of fish is that there is no configuration allowed. If you don't like the out of the box configuration, I would say configuration is still required, but it's unfortunately not available. If you happen to like every single decision the developers made, then I admit having no configuration does mean you end up with a simpler, faster, more maintainable shell.

> If you don't like the out of the box configuration,

Then either decide to like it -- humans are adaptable, this is possible -- or don't use the thing. Both outcomes are acceptable. A hammer doesn't need to have a configurable grip and head and claw in order to be a good tool.

Yes - that's exactly what I said. I'm not sure where you think you disagree. The point of fish is that configuration isn't allowed. I, personally, don't use it.

I guess there isn't disagreement! :) Maybe the point is that you would say it's not allowed whereas I would say it's not necessary.

I think this really shows the two schools of thought, and this is reflected in the attitude towards linux too.

A: Linux is amazing, I can configure everything the exact way I want.

B: Linux sucks, I need to mess around with configurations for hours before I get something usable.

A lot of us just want something that works out of the box with amazing defaults. Others want something that can be tuned to their exact preferences. However, configurability comes with it's own costs too.

Fish isn't that extreme. There's a fair bit of configuration allowed. The devs are just judicious about adding toggles.

You can configure scripting to run at various times, and there are even plugin frameworks for Fish. It just doesn't have toggles for things like language features in the way that ZSH does.

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