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Comment by mathrawka | Hacker News Reader

I used to use fish for a long time... eventually I switched back to zsh because of too many incompatibilities with running shell scripts.

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Several purple have mentioned 'incompatibilities' and I don't understand the problem: sure fish syntax is different and fish cannot be used to run a sh script, so just don't try to run sh scripts with fish. Every script I've run across starts with #!/bin/sh and I can use it from fish with no difficulty (it starts up a sh). The only issue I had is that Vim assumes that your shell is sh compatible, so I put a set shell=sh in my .vimrc and now all the shell stuff in vim runs fine. What problems did you mean?

For me, it is just random stuff is broken. One example is `git mergetool` doesn't work in fish. I have no idea why that would be the case.

I guess the vim issue I ran into (that I solved by telling vim to use sh: set shell=sh), is the same sort of problem as the 'git mergetool' problem you mention.

Speaking for myself, there are a number of times when I have to source scripts from bash to get certain functionality I like. Most notably, when using virtualenv.

Virtualenv puts an activate.fish script into ./bin/ too.

virtualenv has support for fish:

    . bin/activate.fish

As nagisa said, you can simply use: . bin/activate.fish

Even better is Virtualfish, which I've been using and contributing to very happily: https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish

Couldn't you just switch shell in the (presumably) rare case when you want to run a bash shell script?

No need, just run bash with the script: bash script-name. Or better yet, start the script with #!/bin/bash

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