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Comment by vorticalbox | Hacker News Reader

I used ohmyzsh with powerlevel10k/powerlevel10k[0] for years though recently i've settled on fish [1]

[0] https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k [1] https://fishshell.com/

Yeah I tried zsh a few times and never really thought it gave me that much relative to my existing bash config.

Fish on the other hand has stuck, and I'm still discovering nifty new built in features, like the fact that if you type `kill`, you can tab-complete on process names, so like if I want to kill emacs, I can type `kill ema<tab>` and select from the following:

    > kill ema
    3296  (.blueman-applet)  3595  (.blueman-tray-w)  9324  (emacsclient)  9327  (emacs)  9557  (emacsql-sqlite)

If there's only one match it completes the PID for you, and of course if you start typing a PID and press tab it shows the process names along with the potential completions.

I use starship for prompt customization, which is nice because my config transfers just fine from bash over to fish.

What I do is use zsh as my default shell and use oh-my-zsh, but keep a very simple config for my ~/.bashrc, something like:

    [ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash

    source /Users/wyclif/.config/broot/launcher/bash/br

This gives me the best of both worlds.

FWIW, that is also the default behaviour of zsh's standard completion subsystem for kill. You can try it yourself: "zsh -f" to get a shell without reading a fancy config, start compinit, "kill <Tab>".

You can even disable verbose mode via zstyle, should you be the type of person that likes a simple pid list like bash's completion project provides. To me this level of customization is the main feature zsh provides, but not everyone incessantly turns every knob they see.

Nice! It's super useful in fish, good to know it's in zsh too

I start using fish, really like its feature set, but then have to give up and switch back to zsh when I want to get anything done. Unlike zsh, Fish isn't compatible with bash syntax, so a lot of existing scripts and software just doesn't work right. Even today people write scripts as if bash already exists and they seem to always target it. I wish fish had some form of compatibility layer.

I've been using it for years and most things I need nowadays just work (i.e. have Fish support out of the box).

For all the rest, perhaps give https://github.com/edc/bass a try.

Can you add a shebang and make the script executable or just run the script as an argument to the bash program?

This . You just have to use fish for live interacting with the system aaand its great ,for everything else you can stick to bash.

Don't even change your default shell with chsh ,rather just point your terminal emulator to launch fish

Are sourcing bash scripts in a fish shell? If you can either run bash ./xyz or add the shebang #!/bin/bash to run scripts with the intended interpreter

fish has a compatibility layer, and existing scripts still can use bash

Fish runs bash scripts just fine, as it does any script with a shebang line. IT is increasingly compatible with random CLI commands copy and pasted from the internet.

For those that don't work right away, just type `bash` to enter bash shell, run the command return back to Fish.

If a significant part of your day is spent copying CLI command from the internet, then yes, perhaps Bash is a better choice for you.

I recreated my zsh setup in fish with about 10% of the config and just one plugin (fzf.fish).

Nearly everything I want, fancy autocompletion, syntax highlighting, git-aware prompt just worked out of the box.

Can you summarize what made the switch worthwhile for you?

I've been using zsh/omz with a customized powerlevel10k for years now and I see fish mentioned all the time but I didn't really find a compelling reason to try it out for myself.

My niche use case is that since fish comes out of the box with a whole bunch of very nice features (syntax highlighting on the shell, really good autocompletion) it's easy for me to stick it into the set of shell scripts I use to turn a new Ubuntu VM into a dev productivity machine. [1]

I could probably get Zsh to do all the same stuff I would want fish to do out of the box, but it would make reading through and reasoning about the shell scripts more difficult for third parties to audit, who may not be familiar with either tool before they try it.

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

only a few things that are probally also possible in zsh

fish functions are super easy to create on the fly from a command updating $path is fish_add_path {path here} setting global variable is easy set -Ux FOO bar adding -g makes it global

most of these require me to update my .zshrc and source ~/.zshrc as far as i am aware

You just install it and it works. I change devices, or wipe out my devices often enough that just having a familiar shell installed in one line feels comfy. I usually don't customize things a lot, I pick something with good default and rarely change anything on it. I don't want to bother downloading plugins and addons, or fonts, or themes, just for a command interpreter.

For me it came down to speed and maintenance. Fish is incredibly fast and I spend almost no time configuring it, so it’s trivial to bring up on a new system and I don’t have to exercise self-control to avoid tweaking it (that’s a personal failing, not other shells).

It's easy to install. I used to have some fisher plugins, but gave up on those since none of them were really essential.

When I set up a new computer I can just install fish and starship prompt and I'm mostly done. My fish configuration file is just aliasing and sourcing configs from other software, it's been a while since I had to touch it.

fish has by far the best auto-completion out of the box. That’s what sold me.

And the website is amazing. “Finally, a command line shell for the 90s”

Tide is as close to powerlevel10k as one can get in Fish.

https://github.com/IlanCosman/tide

zsh, oh-my-zsh, p10k, fzf, and as of recently zsh-autosuggestions plugin for oh-my-zsh is what I ride on. I keep hearing about fish, and I see what it's doing but I'm not sure what it would bring to the table compared to the setup?

So fish comes with nice defaults. It could happen that you have a complicated zsh setup, then migrate to fish and you find the defaults are fine.

The fish scripting language is nicer (more logical) than the zsh one. That's because zsh needs to be Bourne-ish for historical reasons, and fish has decided to deviate from it. Existing sh, bash, zsh scripts will continue to work just fine. You can write new scripts in fish, or keep writing scripts in zsh or whatever.

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