Fish Shell: A User-Friendly Shell or Like a Heavily Customized zsh | Hacker News Reader

Fish Shell: A User-Friendly Shell or Like a Heavily Customized zsh

fishshell.org

23 pointsjimmybot8 comments

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Some nice features:

1) Advanced tab completion

2) History-based autocomplete (type and press up)

3) Optional cd (.. to go to parent directory)

4) Syntax highlighting

5) Simplified and streamlined syntax

There's also an overview in the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_shell

And the author wrote an introductory article way back: http://lwn.net/Articles/136232/

1) Advanced tab completion
2) History-based autocomplete (type and press up)

3) Optional cd (.. to go to parent directory)

Zshell has these, although the second two might be options that need to be enabled (can't remember). I have both of them on my shell.

You do have to configure 2 and 3, but it's easy and well worth it.

That's basically why I use fish after many years of zsh. zsh can probably do more, but I don't need to configure fish to get something useful that works the way I do. (The only config I've done on my current install are a bunch of aliases and a custom prompt)

I've been admiring fish shell for a while, but use too many computers to justify trying to use it. As a result, I use bash, despite its shortcomings for the pure reason of portability. I can rest at night knowing that the next unix machine I use, will almost certainly have bash installed somewhere, and a version that's compatible with the minimal customization I actually do for it.

> I use bash, despite its shortcomings for the pure reason of portability. I can rest at night knowing that the next unix machine I use, will almost certainly have bash installed somewhere

No, bash isn't standard at all. It's usually installed on Linux, but BSDs and other Unices don't have it installed by default, and not all Linux distros have it either. (Off the top of my head: OpenWRT.) The standard is sh, the bourne shell. It's a pet peeve of mine -- it's really annoying to port things that use bash internally for no reason.

Last I checked there was no vi mode, which is why I stuck with zsh.

Ince, looks very useful. Installing now!

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