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Comment by creamyhorror | Hacker News Reader

I installed Fish last night, first non-default shell I've used ever, because I saw Scott Hanselman's very pretty prompt and realised I'd been missing out. Those custom Bash prompts back in the day were positively primitive compared to what people have been doing with custom fonts and Unicode emoji symbols.

Researched a bunch of themes/prompts, initially wanted oh-my-posh (which Hanselman uses), then Starship.rs because it was fast, then powerlevel10k because it was faster, then saw opinions in favour of Fish over Zsh, sidetripped to r/UnixPorn along the way, and finally settled on Fish + Fisher (plugin manager) + Tide (a Fish port of powerlevel10k) + Catppuccin Fish (a pastel theme). The configuration wizard in Tide makes it very simple to pick the prompt's design and colours, and further customisation is easy too. Quite a rabbithole, but I'm pretty satisfied now!

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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...

I use Starship for the same reason. It's great getting the same UX in Fish on macOS and PowerShell on Windows.

starship looks cool, but the syntax of the shells is still different. so how can the user experience be the same?

for me syntax, search and autosuggestions are the key features of fish which no other shell has and starship doesn't seem provide those.

starship is a prompt, not a shell.

for consistent shell across os i recommend zsh (mingw on windows), or nushell or fish.

yes, i got that. my thought was that UX is more than just the prompt. although it is nice to have a consistent prompt over different systems

I’ve recently discovered ChatGPT is pretty good at translating Bash -> Fish. Can be a time saver.

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.

Also a fish user here, but didn't find a need for Fisher yet. What packages did you install? I used it to install z but every upgrade with fisher just messed things up, so I killed it from my setup and settled on zoxide which has proper fish bindings

Now I just use fish + starship and don't mess around with packages

Here's mine:

fisher install PatrickF1/fzf.fish fisher install urbainvaes/fzf-marks

# These two to get sdkman and nvm to work in fish, IIRC fisher install reitzig/sdkman-for-fish@v1.4.0 fisher install jorgebucaran/nvm.fish

I like https://github.com/meaningful-ooo/sponge

> Sponge quietly runs in the background and keeps your shell history clean from typos, incorrectly used commands and everything you don't want to store due to privacy reasons.

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Also here is a nice list you can take a lookt at: https://github.com/jorgebucaran/awsm.fish

I got it when I started needing nvm a while back. Tide is the second thing I've added - I tend to keep things fairly minimal.

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

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

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