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Comment by dinckelman | Hacker News Reader

I've used fish for about 5 years now, and I don't really wanna go back. Out of the box, without any addons at all, it does everything my old zsh setups did, with a package manager and plugins. The only change I've made to it was spacefish (now starship.rs)

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Same story here. But I recently moved to Tide prompt. It's pure fish and really amazingly fast.

You may also want to try z, and, err... I don't have my config with me, but I have a plugin that notifies me if a long-running background command finishes, which is really handy.

What are your use cases for starship? It looks interesting but I think I'm missing the imagination necessary to use it to its full potential.

The use case for me is a prompt that Just Works. No need to hack $PS1 or anything else, I just install it and everything works.

There are some optional bits for more niche things (like laptop battery) you can enable with a config file, but it’s not necessary.

I also use starship with barely any custom config (like fish). It shows me the environment I'm in for a project, including which versions of tools are active and which server I'm currently connected to (if any). And it looks pretty enough.

Big one for me was out of the box support for showing current kubernetes context. Very helpful if you work in multiple kubernetes clusters and in particular if you move around namespaces helping others.

Doable with configuration and either lots of work or plugins in other shells but the combo of fish + starship.rs offers a lot for little setup.

I use starship with zsh. The biggest value is showing the current environment for any project without any config. Shows the active node version, Python venv, k8s context, all without having to think about it.

The other day an AWS command was rejected with a generic 403 error and at a glance I realized I'd forgotten to switch the default profile—without starship I suspect I would have spent a while troubleshooting my SSO login instead of just switching profiles.

Not OP, but I use Starship with fish and bash, it shows me my git repo's status without having to run `git status`, which is very useful for me.

Does it have support for reverse search yet? Not interested in auto complete.

you just push ctrl-r just like in zsh

I end up installing mcfly (https://github.com/cantino/mcfly) in all my shells, and it works great in fish as well.

There's also fzf.fish, the only plugin I use.

https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish

Same. A shell without fzf now feels weird.

I like https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish

Can also do cool stuff like search for a file to open in $EDITOR and searching git log

type something, press arrow up

Good luck with that if what you’re looking for is in the middle of the command, though

Fish will match the string even so.

I can search for just an argument and it finds the whole command fine

Fish explicitly handles that case

Maybe the recent ctrl-r behavior changes: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/relnotes.html#fish-3-6-0-... do what you want?

Did you have to convert your scripts to fish? Or is there an automated way?

You can always run .sh scripts

Nobody (I know) that uses fish actually writes scripts in fish. Everyone writes scripts in bash for portability.

I’ve been writing all my shell scripts as .fish files for years. They’re just for me and I enjoy the syntax.

Same! I love the syntax, and I only share my .fish scripts with a friend or two I program with that also uses fish.

I’ve used fish for a half decade too, I still write my scripts in bash like everyone else. I want them to be standard and portable.

Longer scripts get the Python treatment or a Go application.

While there is a tool called `babelfish` that will automatically convert bash to fish, in practice it's rarely needed.

You can run bash scripts from fish.

For sourcing, often it makes sense to use direnv to automatically load variables. -- For "just source this one time", in the worst case you can run a bash shell, source that, then run a fish shell.

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