Fish 2.0 shell beta | Hacker News Reader

Fish 2.0 shell beta

ridiculousfish.com

108 pointsizietto56 comments

Lead dev here. Reading the comments is thrilling and makes me even more excited for the official fish 2.0 release, which will be in a few weeks.

For me, the as-you-type suggestions and syntax highlighting make fish feel active and responsive, providing instant feedback. I've also had a great response from casual command line users, who love that features like git tab completions just work, with nothing to configure.

It's going to be a fantastic option for command line users. Meanwhile the action is on the github page at http://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/

Man, I've been using fish as my primary shell for years now, and I just love it. I'm terribly excited about this release. Are there going to be debs for x86/amd64, or maybe even a ppa?

fish 2 pacakges (including debs) are already available: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/siteshwar/ but I would prefer to have an APT conf line too :-)

Fantastic, thank you. Are these legit/official?

The repository is linked in the official readme https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/README.... , so I guess they are

Oh, great, I'll install now then. Thank you.

APT conf line has following format :

deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/siteshwar/Ub... ./

So for e.g. if you're on Ubuntu 12.10 use :

deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/siteshwar/Ub... ./

thank you a lot!

(for importing the key: curl -sL http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/siteshwar/Ub... | apt-key add - )

As a zsh user, fish looks fantastic thanks to its lightness, responsiveness and default settings.

I'm only slightly unhappy about fish requiring python (actually python2 in Arch Linux). AFAIK, this is needed for the web server configuration interface. It'd be much better if fish could be built with this as an addon or optional dependency.

Checked out, compiled and installed in minutes, looks fantastic. I really love the completions based on manpages, which I've already found useful for a tar command (insert relevant xkcd here).

Once I get my shells .rc file converted (I think it's just a few variables & calls to other scripts I'm missing) I'll switch over completely.

Looking forward to the future releases, but looking brilliant so far :)

Something about this shell interests me. I just CANT put my finger on it.

edit: Jokes aside, this is a nice shell, there are no videos of youtube for it though, I should go through the doc's and record one.

edit2: OK I just tried playing around with the shell. It's got some really nice features, but then I said to myself "hey, lets try doing some work with this, I'd like to get rid of fedora 18's neutered package management GUI and replace it with yumex."

ok easy enough, whoops I forgot to use sudo.

sudo !!

   ghoti@localhost ~/Videos> sudo !!
   [sudo] password for ghoti: 
   sudo: !!: command not found
   ghoti@localhost ~/Videos [1]>

oh... ok... docs?

here it is, right at the very end of the documentation.

  "Because history substitution is an awkward interface that was invented 
   before interactive line editing was even possible. Fish drops it in favor of 
   perfecting the interactive history recall interface. Switching requires a small 
   change of habits: if you want to modify an old line/word, first recall it, then 
   edit. E.g. don't type "sudo !!" - first press Up, then Home, then type "sudo "."

.... WHAT?!

ridiculousFish, you arn't kidding around with that name are you?

Is the joke that your username contains fish? For the life of me I can't figure out what the joke is and if its the username bit its a poor joke.

When I made the comment. I was looking at this line:

   For an overview of the features in *fishfish*, see the

Which I took as the official name of the shell, before I later realized it was some kind of wierd typo. my name is pronounced fish-fish. I was drawing attention to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti . I hate English, you see.

I don't hate English. In fact they got a whole lot right after they branched off. Just removing some of the stupidity from Scandinavian, German, French and other words makes a whole lot of difference (Seriously: Genders for words, who came up with that? ; )

The spelling otoh: Yes, that one is broken.

> (Seriously: Genders for words, who came up with that? ; )

It's for entertainment purposes. Provides harmless amusement to native speakers of languages that have it, especially when English (or Chinese, or whatever underfeatured language) speakers fumble the genders of tables, forks, cars, etc.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys. Also good for poets, makes their work more difficult, thus rarer and better smelling when burnt.

fishfish is not a typo, this is a maintained fork of the original fish shell, and it is called fishfish. Unless I'm mistaken, anyway.

Exactly, fishfish is fish's fork of fish. Though at some point a fork becomes the mainline by default, and I sort of feel that fishfish has already passed that point.

It's perfectly reasonable. There is already an interface for recalling previous commands, and an interface for editing the command line. Combining them to issue a variation of a previous command is the logical thing to do. Having a completely wacky alternate syntax for the specific operation of "put the whole previous command in this place surrounded by new text" is a wart. It's like the irregular English syntax that you hate so much, except that in this case there's still time to fix it, because bash hasn't been around that long.

Perfect! I love regular syntax!

For example, Lojban uses a method of saying phonemes to describe words, like Hebrew, so the number 100,508,290 is just an utterance rather than a sentence.

  panono k'io munobi k'io resono

Rather than

  One hundred million, five hundred and eight thousand, two hundred and ninety.

consistent, simple, fast, unambiguous. numbers are a common occurrence, so they should be fast to speak, So when the extremely common occurrence of me forgetting to include sudo for a command that requires escalated privileges, I expect that task made easier.

As an alternative, think of it like this. the specific operation of "put the whole previous command in this place surrounded by new text" is actually a common idiom in calculation programs. Commonly called "ans". Mathmatica actually marks the results of all its computations with a tag (I think t[n]) so you can recall arbitrarily.

That's not to say I'm a stick in the mud, if "sudo !!" sucks, make it better!

How about something that turns a command into a postfix command? Or actually having a hotkey recall the previous command? Maybe a hotkey that looks at the text in the argument then searches up the history to replace? so if I type sudo rm^U it takes 'rm' and searches up history, replacing it with the first match, "sudo rm -rf ~/opt/java"? Lots of possibilities!

How about you just press up arrow to recall the previous command, ctrl-A to go to the beginning of the line, and then type "sudo "? It's the same number of keystrokes as typing "sudo !!". And I'm sure you can use something other than up arrow to recall the previous command if you don't want to take your fingers off the home row.

the reasons are legion.

Up and ctrl A are independent key strokes. They precede typing sudo, which is a logical train of thought ("Oh I forgot sudo, i should of typed sudo and then x").

! is a commonly used key in English language, and pressing it twice is fast, where as getting two desperate keys is not.

After the proposed action, you end up here:

  sudo |something fishy

as opposed to here:

  sudo something fishy|

which prevents you from writing an addendum to that command.

This sounds small, but I was doing what you suggested before I found out I could say "sudo !!" I immediately switched when I found out, and it's now a very common idiom for me. I switched from "up home sudo space" to "sudo space bang bang" for all the reasons described above.

I used fish for a while -- and I think I might go back -- and I missed "sudo !!" too. I like this suggested[1] function as a replacement:

    function sudo!!
        eval sudo $history[1]
    end

[1]: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/288#issuecom...

I thought the hotkey was more attractive, but I can't seem to get that one to work. Thanks for the suggestion, sudo!! gets the job done.

Anyone looking at fish may be interested in the design document, "a description of the design principles that have been used to design fish". The principles are

  The law of orthogonality
  The law of minimalism
  Configurability is the root of all evil
  The law of user focus
  The law of discoverability

http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/design.html

"The law of minimalism" was recently changed to "law of responsiveness":

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/612

A way to move to fish gradually is to use it on your local machine (interactively) but still write scripts in bash and stick to bash on remote hosts. This helps keep you in sync with others.

One drawback is keeping your aliases in sync, but once done it is not much work.

This is what would be keeping be back I think. I spent too much of my day in remote shells on systems where I do not have root. This shell looks really cool, but I am afraid that I would come to depend on its features and thus lose my bashfu skills in the process.

I've been using Fish for close to a year now and I can't go back. It's subtly making my shell better without getting in the way. You don't notice it very much, until you have to use a machine without it - at which point you will miss it sorely.

It was so much fancier than ZSH which I've been using pretty throughly for years, but I wasn't impressed until I used a oh-my-fish like "framework". Now with a bump to ><<<+> 2.0 I'll give it a go again!

https://github.com/bpinto/oh-my-fish

If I switch from bash to fish, will anything break (e.g. aliases, scripts, keyboard shortcuts, etc.)?

Yes -- fish is not bash, so anything defined in your .bash_profile etc. will break, though there's usually an easy alternative way to do it in fish. Scripts should be fine though, since they usually explicitly call bash when you run them, so will still run using bash.

I switched to fish about six months ago and have been very happy with it. I spend a lot of my working day in the command line, though not doing anything exotic, and find it very pleasant to use.

Scripts will still work as long as they have the standard #!/bin/bash at the top.

Aliases - in .bashrc - unfortunately will need to be replaced by Fish functions; defined in the "~/.config/fish/config.fish" file by default.

The only real thing that keeps tripping me up with Fish is that it doesn't support shortcuts like "!$ ". I keep on typing that in, but due to the nature of Fish, it can't (or won't) recognise it. But the excellent history functionality does make up for this a fair bit.

Having said that, Fish is by far the best shell I've tried. I gave zsh a go for about half a year and got fed up with the autocompletion and general slowness. As a shell, Fish just behaves quickly and fairly naturally, with few exceptions (!$ ...).

I highly recommend it as an improvement over bash.

> I keep on typing that in, but due to the nature of Fish, it can't (or won't) recognise it. But the excellent history functionality does make up for this a fair bit.

I was interested in this comment so I looked into the documentation to find out why this is. Here's a link to the FAQ for anyone else interested:

http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/faq.html#faq-h... (last question)

that works just as well I guess. But what if I want to make an alias for "sudo the last command"?

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/288#issuecom... has some options.

Wonderful!

I made a slight variation (and also posted it there):

      function .runsudo --description 'Run current command line as root'
        set cursor_pos (echo (commandline -C) + 5 | bc)
        commandline -C 0
        commandline -i 'sudo '
        commandline -C "$cursor_pos"
      end
      bind \es ".runsudo"

Instead of outright `execute`ing the command, the above would save the cursor position. You can (theoretically) bind `\cs` so control-s adds the sudo (instead of option-s), but I couldn't get it to work.

I'm a little sore that the FAQ Listed that as an alternative. That was how I did it in bash before I realized I could do "sudo !!" which was waaaaay more convenient.

It's a step backwards. Which I'm fine with, as long as you step forward again, in some way.

Fish is not a POSIX shell and does not try to be one. In contrast, bash, zsh, and others are supersets of the original sh and backwards-compatible. Fish is not.

For example the exit code of the previous command, instead of POSIX $?, you can get it as $status.

Look out for errors with third-party applications that shell out and expect to find bash or something compatible. I had to explicitly set shell=/bin/bash in .vimrc before any plugin initialization in order to avoid breakage after changing my login shell to fish.

I've found that leaving your login shell as bash but making fish the default executable for any terminal emulators you use will pretty much prevent any breakage.

Don't you mean "Fish 2.0 shell betta"?

Huh? Oh.

"Betta (pron.: /ˈbɛtə/) is a large genus of small, often colorful, freshwater ray-finned fishes"

I would like to have UndistractMe [0] for fish. However, I am not sure if it is possible to hook into or wrap command execution. You know a command has finished, when a new prompt is shown. However, how do you start the clock?

Tried posting this to the fish mailinglist, but moderation pending for weeks now.

[0] http://mumak.net/undistract-me/

Created an issue https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/672

I once tried fish 1 year ago by "accidient". Got instantly addicted. Why do other shells have to be so akward? It totaly clear to me, that bash & co frightens people from using CLI.

Instantly switched to fish. Never looked back.

Does anyone know how to initially import zsh's history into fish?

Is this a fork of the other shell named fish? I use a shell also named fish with the same syntax as this one, but whose development stopped a few years ago.

Yes, the one packaged in Linux distro's is 1.23.X. Last I heard on the mailing list, the original author was jazzed someone new picked it up.

Where is the feature list? do you have screenshots?

I know it's hard with a CLI, but still if it's colorful better show the baby...

http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/index.html

This looks awesome!, I'll definitely try it! (the color configuration approach is very clever)

Can't find 2.0 in the Gentoo repos.. anyone like to share his ebuild?

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/siteshwar/Ce...

For anyone else having problems finding native packages for Linux, I am building packages for several Linux distros at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/siteshwar/

Does it work with Cygwin?

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