So I’ve been using Linux now for a while, and am looking to migrate my dev environment to vim and spend more time in the command line. I’m fairly comfortable with bash but by no means an expert. I’ve used zsh with some minor customization but just recently learned about fish. I’d love to hear people’s opinions.
An old sysadm introduced me to zsh 28 years ago now and I’ve used it as my primary shell ever since. It’s tried, tested and most certainly works well.
Genuinly asking, what is wront/lacking in bash?
I use fish because I have better things to do than tweak my shell configuration and debug shell plugins.
When I tried oh-my-zsh and prezto (I think?) they came with tons of plugins that performed badly and made it hard to get things done (specifically, they ran git status synchronously on every new prompt, which does not work well in a moderately large repo). Fish had similar features but wasn’t horribly slow, so I use it.
I’m also using fish shell, it find it very user friendly and extremely practical. It gathers all the programs options which you can see when pressing Tab and together with the fzf plugin for history and file search it becomes a very smart shell to use.
ZSH, ZSH, ZSH! Fish is not POSIX compliant, meaning most shell scripts won’t work and it has its own special snowflake syntax.
Also, don’t use Oh-My-ZSH! Just use the package manager in your system.
you can always run scripts with the shell they were written for (and you can even argue that people writing scripts should always set the shebang)
If I have to switch shells all the time when another shell, zsh has the same functionality as fish, without the switching around, I’ll use that. Not to mention fish causes
flatpakto not add Flatpaks to the app menu until restart. Environment variable messes. If I have to install a bunch of other stuff to make fish work, vs make zsh work more nicely, I’ll pick the 2nd one.
I use Fish shell and while it is pretty nice on its own, the fact that it is non-standard does cause problems. Many times you will search for something online and you’ll find nice bash results, which either you will have to execute directly in bash or modify to work correctly in Fish.
I don’t think all of Fish’s design choices are the best, either. But for an OOTB experience, it is nicer than either Bash or Zsh.
