[matthewlehner]

I like the features it has, but every time someone post a link to fish shell, I wonder why I would switch from bash or zsh. Will this really be THAT MUCH BETTER? Will I just run into weird errors? Is it totally sh compliant? These are important things to know and should be on the homepage.

[AlexMax]

I am a year-or-two-old fishshell convert who is reasonably well versed in bash and tried using zsh and bash with a big .bashrc.

A few things stand out to me as huge pluses:

- It has a lot of cool functionality out of the box such as highlighting, smarter autocomplete (type in a partial word at the prompt and hit up instead of the cumbersome bash ctrl r/s history prompt that loves to beep at you), directory history (alt left-arrow and alt right-arrow), and more.

- You don't need a 10k .bashrc or 1k .zshrc to unlock most of that cool functionality, it's just enabled by default. So anywhere you have fishshell installed, you get 95% of what you're used to, no need to git clone or scp over your .bashrc.

- Startup time is _very_ quick compared to bash or zsh with said 10k .bashrc or 1k .zshrc, and is comparable to bash or zdh with no startup file.

The only weird error I ever ran into was with an older version of fish shell complaining about missing directories in your PATH every time there was an automatic completion available. I have not run into that issue with newer releases.

It is not sh-compliant, which will occasionally wreck havoc when you have a program that shells out without explicitly using sh. I remember running into this issue specifically with vim and emacs on more than one occasion, but truth-be-told I consider this a bug with those programs rather than a fault with fish.

There's also the matter of it not being installed on some machines, but I've used bash for so many years now that my brain flips back into bash-mode anytime I see that familiar colorless prompt with a dollar sign at the end.

It's not an essential upgrade. I also wouldn't bother using it for shell scripts either. But I'd say give it a boy scout try for interactive usage and see how you like it.

[naranja]

I fully agree: The sensible and intuitive defaults (ie. arrow up/down for history; tab/rightarrow for autocompletion) and simply so much which just works out of the box (beautiful styled completion list with program descriptions in it, colors, sensible help) made me instantly fall in love with fish.

Be sure to try Fish 2.0 which is even much more awesome than the older version.

[andrewflnr]

I just want to throw in that you can get that nice up-arrow-history in bash too. It's the first thing I put in a new bash environment:

  bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
  bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

[dfc]

Do you know anyone with a 10k .bashrc?

[AlexMax]

My apologies, I was being a little facetious. Just a little. :)

The size difference was based on my intuition that when I maintained my own .bashrc and .zshrc, I was able to "get away" with fewer total lines in my .zshrc than my .bashrc. I remember my .bashrc being dozens of pages, my .zshrc was only a couple.

Compare that to my fish init file...all it does is set a few paths and aliases and turn off the greeting, because everything else just works out of the box for me.

[__david__]

I just checked, for fun:

    $ ls -lh .bashrc
    -rw-r--r--    1 <me>    <me>         10k Jul 26 13:31 .bashrc

Yep.

It's also remarkably fast because I took great effort to optimize the parts that happen the most. Shell is actually pretty fast if you don't fork and exec all the time...

[dfc]

What do you have in it that takes up so much space? FYI: I'm not being argumentative, I am genuinely curious.

[__david__]

Well, it's about 400 lines total. Roughly 40% of that is PATH handling functions: add_to, append_to, replace_in, remove_from, prefix and unprefix. They're used like:

    add_to PATH /usr/sbin

prefix and unprefix are a macro for a bunch of standard replace_in/remove_froms:

    prefix() {
        replace_in PATH "$1/bin"
        replace_in PATH "$1/sbin"
        replace_in PATH "$1/lib/ccache"
        replace_in MANPATH "$1/share/man"
        replace_in MANPATH "$1/man"
        replace_in PKG_CONFIG_PATH "$1/lib/pkgconfig"
    ...etc.

So that later I can do stuff like:

    prefix /usr/local
    prefix /usr/local/brew
    prefix /usr/local/ports

...All of which are managed by different package managers (stow, brew, ports).

All that stuff is the part I optimized so that it only uses bash built-ins and never execs. Converting that away from sed/perl shaved about 8 seconds off my startup time (it's now so fast I don't notice it).

The next 20% is interactive stuff. Setting up the prompt, aliases, stty, etc. This is generally more complicated than it technically needs to be because it's cross platform so it'll run on any unix-y thing with no changes.

Then remaining 40% is a big chunk of shell functions that are mostly unused in my day-to-day life, but kept there to jog my memory if I need to do a certain task.

That adds up to 100%, but it's also worth noting that 27% of that is blank lines and comments.

[eblume]

I know people with well more than that, particularly when you factor in 'oh my zsh' and its ilk.

[dfc]

I am not sure I would include oh-my-zsh as someone's personal zshrc. Moreover I thought OP had made a distinction between bash (10k) and zsh (1k) so I am not sure how o-m-z counts as a bashrc? I will take your word for it but I cant imagine what people put in there bashrc to get to 10k. The entire bash-it repository is 8,588 and over a third of it is bash completions which seems to duplicate the majority of what is already provided by bash-completion. And I am not sure that bash-completion is really "my .bashrc."

  $ cd bash-it
  $ sloccount ./ 
  ...SNIP...
  SLOC    Directory       SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
  3198    completion      sh=3198
  3168    plugins         sh=3168
  1081    themes          sh=1081
  748     lib             sh=748
  242     aliases         sh=242
  135     top_dir         sh=135
  16      template        sh=16
  0       custom          (none)


  Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
  sh:            8588 (100.00%)

Are there some big bashrc customizations that I might be overlooking?

edited to reflect distinction between parent and grandparent comment

[eblume]

Sorry, I'm not the parent commenter.

[jfb]

The thing that's stalled me out from using fish before is that it's different enough from the Bourne shell that it seriously interrupts my day to day usage; but it's TOO similar, with the horrible shell semantics. So it's never really been worth it to me.

[ilaksh]

Take a look at the concept of status quo bias.

What I do is spawn fish at the end of my .zshrc that way I can just exit if I run into something that doesn't work with fish.

The biggest plus for me is that the default auto complete in fish is twice as smart as the other ones.

[qznc]

It is NOT totally sh compliant. Intentionally.