Fish Shell 3.5.0 (opens in new tab)

I used fish for a long time, but lost patience with the incompatibility with other shells. It’s nice to be able to just paste and run someone else’s command, and I eventually tired of having to rewrite every command to use fish syntax. For example, replacing FOO= with set - x … The reverse is even worse—if I need to send someone a command to run, I have to rewrite it in a syntax that’s likely to work when they run it. It only takes a few seconds each time but I grew weary of it.

I was in a similar situation 2 years ago and I took the plunge. Turns out, the amount I had to rewrite was fairly minimal, and the benefits of Fish are just incredible. I'd say: go for it, you won't regret it!

Personally, I'm a lover of subshells, I often write things like (cd mydir && make), making use of the fact the 'cd mydir' only happens in the subshell.

Fish doesn't have anything like that, there are a few workaround, but none of them are (in my opinion) anywhere near as nice.

zsh has survived for longer (it's "Lindy") and is therefore more widely available on remote machines. Also, maybe just my problem, but I do get frustrated having to switch back to bash/zsh syntax and semantics in cases where Fish isn't available, or when writing scripts others will use. Easier for me to stick with zsh for my shell and bash for shipping shell scripts.

zsh tends to actually run scripts when you feed them. As long as you can resist the urge to run all of your POSIX scripts in fish, I think I much prefer fish as an interactive shell.

Last time I looked into switching the vim mode in zsh was better by enough of a margin that I didn't switch, but that was years ago. I've been meaning to give fish another shot.

You can 1. Make your scripts executable or 2. Use bash / zsh inside of fish. 3. You can define wrapper functions in fish that just call bash/zsh functions internally. I use fish, although I hate writing scripts in it. It just feels wrong. Better stick to good old bash.

process substitution?

fish: Invalid redirection target: yq3 r <(kubectl get nodes -o yaml)

I always recommend fish to anyone who doesn't (yet!) have strong opinions about their shell.

Immediately seeing if you misspelled a command because the color changes is a huge benefit if you're not super familiar with the command line.

The auto-complete and suggestions are also miles better than bash - they are automatically generated from man pages, so most commands have a usable set of completions.

The web-based config lets you easily tweak settings that would otherwise be an incomprehensible soup of PS1=3!@*(!@!@ gobbledygook.

Also, it mostly "just works" out of the box, so you really don't have to waste any time setting anything up if you don't really care.

For me, fish made my life instantly better without any real investment coming from bash. There are some incompatibilities, but I felt productive right away.

Yes, it's worth it! Fish is especially great for users who have found learning bash troublesome or uninviting. It's simpler and easier to learn, and plus it has very pleasant defaults and builtins. If you get started with Fish, you're much more likely to learn advanced functionality because the journey is more enjoyable than with bash.

I used zsh for years with a moderately elaborate configuration that grew into a pain in the ass to manage. I started using fish a few months ago with no configuration of my own. I'm still not sure if I'll stick with it in the long run, but if nothing else it's a welcome reprieve.

Fish to me is like writing a document in Word. Bash is more like writing it in Notepad. (or whatever Linux equivalent you want to use)

Though I still write my scripts as bash scripts (with shebang as the first line).

The auto-completion alone is worth it IMO. I've been using fish for 6 or 7 years now, and having it hint ahead some obscure command that I only use once a month saves me so much time reading MAN/searching online.

Pair that with tldr and it's a really good experience.

I’m an avid bash user for the same fear of incompatibility. But how does that work in practice? I mean- if I use Fish shell interactiveley, how does that affect shell scripts? I presume they would still be run via bash (#!/bin/bash)

Why did you need to port them? The occasional simple shell script I write in bash. You can just use fish interactively.

Same here, fish is amazing until is isn't. I really wish it was POSIX

Hello, fish shell dev here. We opened an issue on our tracker - when you get a chance we'd appreciate if you'd share some tmux logs there, as I wasn't able to reproduce with your config file.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/9019

[Late Update]

The fish 3.5.0 release is not responsible for my tmux issue. False alarm.

Downgrading did somehow help me regain shell interaction, but I can't create a new session/pane, etc.

I think something else broke my tmux setup during the brew upgrade, or possibly even before it.

Would you mind posting a link to your tmux config? I'd look into it.

Since such URLs very often come from copy & paste another way to deal with this is smart auto-quoting when a paste is detected via the "bracketed paste" feature of modern terminal emulators. zsh does this if you enable url-quote-magic.

Zsh Completions is a pretty good alternative for anyone using zsh.

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-completions

Yes: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/psub.html

> If you love bash or zsh, and are in the habit of building long complex commands on the command line, then stick with bash or zsh.

Fish handles this very ably as well, of course! If you're a developer and you work in or deploy to a lot of environments where you can't install software, choosing what comes with the environment makes sense. But even when it comes to scripting, you won't regret sticking with Fish, imo.

Have you tried it recently? It's gotten a lot better. The following commands used to not work, but now they all do:

    true && echo hi
    false || echo hi
    export VAR=1
    VAR=1 somecommand
    echo "$(echo substitution)"