Comment by barosl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barosl | Hacker News Reader

I definitely recommend fish to every newcomer to Unix. It has sane defaults, colorful output, and so many features that work out of the box.

That said, there is a long-standing issue regarding inline environment variables.[1] Briefly speaking, fish does not recognize the `NAME=value command` form. So you should use `env` to work around this. This may not be a deal breaker, but I'm a bit annoyed, and migrated to zsh.

I would call zsh the opposite to fish. It has insane defaults, is highly customizable, and has so many features that are initially disabled. After hours of configuring it, I loved it.[2] Since then whenever I set up a new Unix machine zsh has been the first thing to install.

So, I would recommend zsh for the people who are used to Unix. If not, or you don't bother to customize it, there's always fish. There is no place for bash.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/438

[2] https://github.com/barosl/baroslized-settings/blob/master/.z...

Using `env` is very much a feature, not a bug. It's part of fish's philosophy to use programs rather than builtins wherever possible. It's good practice to use `env` even when using other shells.

> It has insane defaults, is highly customizable, and has so many features that are initially disabled.

Ah yes, the Emacs and Vim school of configuration.

Fish is great. I used it for a couple of years, right up until I had to install a software system that made extensive use of bash scripts that were incompatible with it. At the time I was in too much of a hurry to figure out how to tell the software to explicitly use bash, or something along those lines.

Why would a software system that relies on bash not explicitly use bash for its scripts?

Bad developers. For example, I used Arch Linux for a number of years, where `/bin/sh` is a symlink to bash. Switching that to point to `dash` broke a number of programs both in the official repositories and the AUR. A lot of shell scripters can't spot a bashism, and just as many don't know that other shell syntax even exists.

That's a different problem, though. /bin/sh must point to a sh-compatible shell. fish is not a sh-compatible shell. Therefore, any script using /bin/sh will never attempt to run as fish (as /bin/sh will never point to fish).

The reason I'm having a hard time imagining how a scripting system that relies on bash would fail with fish is because I can't imagine how one would actually write a script that is executed with the user's login shell. There's no #! line that would do that by accident.

There's just one scenario: a completely absent #! line.

It's an easy fix, just add the line, otherwise 0755 scripts with no #! do execute using the current shell.

That doesn't work for me (in Fish).

  > cat foo
  echo wat
  > ./foo
  Failed to execute process './foo'. Reason:
  exec: Exec format error
  The file './foo' is marked as an executable but could not be run by the operating system.

It does however work in Bash. So this appears to be a bash-ism, rather than an OS feature.

Ah, bummer. I tested in csh too but not fish.

More likely, and somewhat less judgmentally, developers that are ignorant of the distinction.

Unless you want to define "bad" as "ignorant of some facet of computing" in which case we all fit.

I can't think of any other definition of "bad" when it comes to programming. But I do appreciate your sentiment and realize I was being unjustly negative.

As a rule of thumb you should make fish the default shell for your terminal emulator and leave bash as the login shell. This will let all the system configuration scripts work just fine.

The only time when POSIX incompatibility still hurts is if your workflow requires you to be source shell snippets.

Just to add to the first line, it also seems fairly well-commented in the code, at least the couple pieces I've looked at. This is really good for me as I often check the source first and helpful (or any) commenting is quite rare.

>There is no place for bash.

Just curious, why do you say this? I've used bash for years for basic command line things and now it sounds like I've been missing out on great features that other shells have.

Sorry if my words were too strong. I said that because I like tools that do a particular job well. bash might be a middle ground tool that has moderately sane defaults and features. However, in other words, bash is inferior to fish with regard to easiness, and is worse than zsh with regard to feature set. I'm not a fan of such a tool.

I believe the world could have been a better place if they adopted fish as a default shell.

Interesting. I'll have to give both of those a try.

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