The defaults of fish are great and common tasks are simple. The for loop syntax was so intuitive I got it right the first time without checking Google (which I have to do every time I write a bash for loop).

Not much more to say I think.

Fish is nice in many ways, but it kinda lives up to its "A command line for the 90's" slogan. It's better than what came before it, but I'm not sure it's better enough. Using a non-POSIX shell can feel like death by 1000 cuts sometimes, and I wasn't sure the benefits of Fish were worth the cost. Also, scripting feels like a bit of an afterthought in Fish and that's a very important part of a shell to me.

These days I'm feeling optimistic about Nushell; it's not quite ready for most people to use as a daily driver, but it's getting there and it has a much stronger value proposition than Fish.

Then I tried switching to zsh with oh-my-zsh and all that. 42 million tunable bits and I still didn't get it to my liking.

Then I found Fish and 95% of the stuff was good enough out of the box. The only things I've really added was Starship[0] as a prompt - again good enough with pretty much zero configuration and fzf[1] for history search.

Now I use it everywhere, synced via Homeshick[2]

I still use bash to write shell scripts that aren't long enough to be converted to Python though.

[0] https://starship.rs [1] https://github.com/jethrokuan/fzf [2] https://github.com/andsens/homeshick

Using just plain bash seems so foreign to me. Having no FZF command history search or intelligent auto-completion would kill my productivity. I'd say it's as essential to my workflow as tmux.

The only major downside of fish, in my experience, is the incompatibility with bash scripts. Sometimes it's a hassle to rewrite those to be fish-compliant. But honestly, this is something I run into once in a blue moon. On the flip side, the simple fish syntax really encourages me to write my own fish functions, whereas with bash I was always dreading writing bash scripts.

Personally, I can fully recommend fish. In my experience, switching to it is not even painful at all, not like vim which took me quite some dedication to get through the learning curve (switched from Sublime Text).

In December just gone I gave up on macOS after 17 years and switched to Linux. Thought I’d take the opportunity to try a new shell and went for fish (though I still use bash on certain remote hosts for a variety of reasons).

autocomplete and colours/highlighting are more than enough to keep me using it. I really enjoy them. But…

I don’t yet love how history works. Four months in, I still can’t get used to not having ctrl-r.

I miss the symmetry of `do … done` in loop syntax, finding `for … end` jarring.

The lack of !! really grates sometimes. I was going to say I miss `^x^y` last command modification, but actually I can’t recall trying it since switching.

`VAR=x cmd …` doesn’t seem to work quite how I expect. I have an alias/function to perform SSO login to AWS, which expands to `BROWSER=otherfunc aws sso login` - otherfunc itself expanding to `firefox -P workprofile`. This stubbornly opens a Firefox tab in some random window, regardless of profile - despite otherfunc on its own always working. I did not, IIRC, have this trouble with bash.

Fish excels as an everyday interactive shell. I never program shell scripts. I write Julia code whenever something equivalent of a shell script is needed. Before that I often used Go.