Let's release Rust-based fish | Hacker News Reader

Let's release Rust-based fish

github.com

57 pointsankitrgadiya16 comments

For those who haven’t been following along, Fish has been ported to Rust over the last year and a half: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512

- Nobody really likes C++ or CMake, and there's no clear path for getting off old toolchains. Every year the pain will get worse.

- C++ is becoming a legacy language and finding contributors in the future will become difficult, while Rust has an active and growing community.

- Rust is what we need to turn on concurrent function execution.

- Being written in Rust will help fish continue to be perceived as modern and relevant.

It’s been pretty successful on the whole as the goal hasn’t been a big rewrite, but a module-by-module port, which will serve as a new baseline.

Is there any report on performance improvements or new features that this rewrite unlocked?

Furthermore, how does it compare to Nushell which is also written in Rust?

https://www.nushell.sh

What difference from ZSH, any reason I have to use it over other?

As my understaning it bring bunch of features out of box, syntax highligh, tab completion etc.?

> As my understaning it bring bunch of features out of box, syntax highligh, tab completion etc.?

I think this is a good summary. The best thing about fish is that you don't need to install any plugins to get all of the nice things that other people put a lot of effort into configuring: tab completion, syntax highlighting, and so on. It's also just really comfortably ergonomic in a way that is hard to describe unless you've used it - multiline commands automatically update their indentation as you type, completions for most common programs come pre-bundled, you can easily set environment variables globally across all of your shell instances without fiddling with config files or reloading your shells, and so on.

Faster, simpler and nicer to use, in my limited experience of ZSH. A focus on great defaults rather than expandability. But then I’m somewhat biased, having settled on Fish over a decade ago. ZSH might be better now.

Can you elaborate on "simpler and nicer to use"? The last time I've seen a description the differences, they were just minor simplifications of bashisms, like iterating an array, which don't simplify the experience significantly.

I switched to Fish about a decade ago too. "simpler and nicer to use" is a good summary, but to flesh it out a bit from my perspective: given how much time I spend in the terminal, the every day ergonomics are quite important to me. I used to use ZSH with oh-my-zsh and a bunch of plugins, over the years this got slower and slower, and the maintenance burden got annoying. It got to a point where opening a new terminal window would take maybe 5 seconds before it was ready to use. I tried Fish one day, and literally everything I'd customised ZSH to do came for free out of the box, no plugins, no maintenance. Startup time was instant. I now use Fish with a Starship prompt and I'm never going back.

The speed impact is one reason I've never liked oh-my-zsh and similar for other shells.

It's also why I love starship https://starship.rs/. Lots of plug-ins to customise what I want at the prompt, and all of it native compiled such that it executes in milliseconds.

One of the important differences with bash, which is not dramatic but kind of low level is lack of `>()` process substitution.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/1786

It is worth mentioning that exists `<()` and is implemented via a helper command `psub`: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/psub.html

Yeah, that great we have a lot of different opinion on thing and tools. For personal use i would try it. But for server side we as usual stick to default shipment, vim, zsh etc

What installs zsh by default? From my understanding you have to choose to go out of your way to use zsh over bash (or in some cases dash).

zsh has been the default on macOS for a while now so it's pretty commonly used

Sure, but the comment was

> But for server side we as usual stick to default shipment, vim, zsh etc

And macOS isn't a server OS.

zsh has been default on MacOS for a while, after bash started licensing as GPLv3.

MacOS uses zsh by default

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