My shell setup with Fish and Tmux (2021)

Also on the Fish + Fisher + Tide train. I've been using fish for some years now, always been a fan of the autocomplete and highlighting, but Tide feels like a step up. Really like the way it shows my node version on the right is a relevant project.

I used to do that very custom setup for a few years... Lately I've settled for https://starship.rs/ doesn't matter the shell the experience is the same. I find it difficult sometimes to use loops or variable creation on fish, so jumping to bash real quick without changing experience is so convenient... Another thing I don't like is that if I create a one liner at work to process batches of files/hosts in fish, then I must translate that to bash in wikis, otherwise people would be forced to use fish to replicate...

modern fanxy zsh/bash and even fish and nushell prompt is starship.

there's also /r/unixart for more screenshots!

Nice, I was just about to dive into tmux for the first time but I hate too much configuration, will check this out!

I use wezterm and love it, too - BUT, it doesn't yet support SSH agent forwarding, which are an integral part of my workflow for some machines.

So it's great -- for me -- for local connections, or remote ones where I don't need to pass an SSH agent, but it's not yet there "fully" for me the way KiTTY is.

Lua-scripted config with event dispatch is a huge win, totally not interested in polling and sed'ing just to get automatic dark mode

I'm sure everyone has a favorite, mine is simply able to slide out iTerm2 from the top of the screen with a hotkey (tilde ofc.) à la Quake console.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/48796/iterm-as-a-s...

I really like iterm2 integration with tmux when windows are native.

kitty’s completely borderless mode, hyperconfigurability, and general aesthetics (and GPU rendering but it matters little)

iTerm's session restoration. It just works, without manually saving or anything. Saved me tons of time from reboots or crashes.

I used to be an iTerm user long ago but haven't used anything but Terminal.app the last decade. Can't really say I miss the bells and whistles.

True colour support and decent custom bindings are what keep me off of Terminal.app.

then fish is maybe not for you for now. i like fish exactly because it broke out of the limitations imposed by POSIX. in my view, POSIX should have never even gone as far as specifying any kind of shell syntax. imagine what we'd do if it had gone even as far as specifying programming languages. that stuff just doesn't belong there.

compatibility should be limited to interoperability. but it should not limit how we can design our tools.

and the tools do adapt. more and more of them work just fine with fish. maybe some day in the future your tools will work with fish too.

I spend half a day trying to export my two decades of bash/zsh customizations

don't. if you switch to fish, you should not want/need those customizations, because if you want to make fish look or work like your old shell, why are you even switching? you are learning a new environment with new features. get used to fish as it is first. after a while you may discover fish's own customization options, and the many tools that provide customizations across multiple shells. your own handcoded adaptions are probably not even portable to any other shell.

Reinventing the whole wheel to make it look exactly the way you want, while disregarding compatibility with everything that already exists, is probably the biggest violation of the UNIX philosophy

fish is not reinventing the wheel. it is creating new wheels with features that we never had before.

the popularity of fish just shows that this incompatibility is not a problem to many. if it were, fish would be dead by now. other shells are gaining ground that also break compatibility and maybe we'll find a future where these compatibility issues are not issues anymore because we will have learned to build environments that don't depend on that compatibility.

One idea: Maybe your shell functions do not all need to be shell functions, maybe they can be shell scripts instead.

Put them in ~/bin, then you can use them regardless of the shell you're using.

Of course, if the shell function or alias needs to modify the shell state, then it won't work as a shell script.

I am using fish full time for about 2 years. I have to switch to zsh very occasionally, my main frustration was with py venv activate but apparently there's a fish activate script now. I am enjoying it otherwise. I use Starship though, not OMF. I didn't have too many custom functions to migrate too.

Virtualenv supports fish just fine.

. venv/bin/activate.fish

> The main inconvenience of fish is not even having to go into another shell for some tasks like virtual env activation

For stuff like "in this directory, I want this virtual env activated", I'd recommend using direnv.

https://direnv.net/

> wondering whether some command you just ran silently did something wrong because of shell incompatibility

I don't recall running into silent incompatibities. Do you have examples in mind?

Although, yeah, you can't just copy-paste most sh/bash snippets into fish.

> The main inconvenience of fish is not even having to go into another shell for some tasks like virtual env activation, but wondering whether some command you just ran silently did something wrong because of shell incompatibility.

I have the impression that you just overlook all the rest of the things that can go wrong when using Bash, because you are simply used to it, you know it and you know how it will behave. In the sense that with Dash you would perhaps have a similar problem. Fish is really pleasant and forgives a lot.

> Also, I wonder how fast is OMF compared to Starship?

Those are two total different projects. During my hypomania on Fish (yup), I didn't even use OMF, but added things manually and only those really needed, so that there was as little code to maintain as possible. Fish does not have a huge number of scripts, plug-ins. If Starship is too slow for you, you might like Tide. I found nothing more interesting, after which I returned to Starship anyway, but it's really fast.

https://github.com/IlanCosman/tide

Perhaps you don't need something faster than Starship, just to configure Fish in such a way that it cleans itself of garbage and runs asynchronously?

i love it when innovations in a new application are carried over to older tools. zsh seems especially suitable for that. it soaks up good ideas like a sponge and finds a way to integrate them. on the other hand it does make zsh feel kind of overwhelming at times in terms of options available.

my favorite part besides autosuggestions is the way history works, not incremental but i can type out a search term, and then start searching up and down the history.

incremental search is always irritating me by showing me irrelevant stuff while i am still typing, which i find distracting because i have to process it while at the same time focusing on typing the search term right.

now if only i could also have multiple search terms...

(i also prefer the fish syntax, but that is more of a matter of taste and getting used to)

Here is another great plugin that pairs nicely with the above.

https://github.com/Aloxaf/fzf-tab

If you mean to mix in GUI, on macOS, there is BitBar and another one (forgot the name) that just puts a big coloured dot in the menubar that you can curl to change its color. Something along that line would work.

tmux. If a bell, or ctrl-g, is output on the terminal, the tmux status line will indicate this fact if you are viewing a different terminal. It will stay indicating until you switch back to that terminal.

tmux will also show you the name of the command that's currently running, so if it's a make file or other script that finishes, you can observe that on it's own, but if you add an `echo -e "\007"` to the end of your script, you'll get the indicator.

If I understand correctly, you have a remote server with a logfile, and some markers in this log file tells you whether the build is in process or finished.

I would suggest you keep it simple and simply poll the logfile for the latest occurrence of either "Build started" or "Build finished" and display a pop-up for each case.

Very roughly that would look like:

  while true
  do
    MATCH=$(ssh remote@host 'cat /logfile' | grep -P 'started|finished' | tail -1)
    case "$MATCH" in
      *started*)
        notify-send "Build started"
        ;;
      *finished*)
        notify-send "Build finished"
        ;;
    esac
    sleep 1s
  done

That's dirty bash written in an HN comment on my phone, but the idea is here. It's a bit wasteful to initiate ssh sessions so often, so you could improve it with a single "ssh remote@host tail -f /logfile", pipe that to "grep", then to a while read, but I left that as an exercise.

There is some option to notify-send so that pop-ups replace one another instead of creating new ones.

If you're on a mac that sounds doable with iterm. I have some code in my fish config to bounce the dock icon when a longrunning command ends

In some cases you can get away with simple solutions like just printing the BEL character a few times:

  make install; printf \\a\\a\\a

I think the bell character suggestion might be the simplest, but depending on how long the build takes you might want to check ntfy.sh

I alias the build command to POST a notification using curl and get it on the browser/phone

You can change the tab title with ansi escapes. These days you can use Unicode chars as well, and some have colors, say with a emoji font.