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.
If you’re looking for a nicer shell for personal use, fish is pretty nice
If you want to run arbitrary scripts and deal with setup scripts from coworkers etc, you’ll want to fall back to zsh/bash regularly, though
If you’re fine with understanding when your shell is the problem, fish is nice for interactive use
Both are good (and Bash too). Try them all and choose the best one depending on the context. For example, on my main PC I use fish with a few plugins (and fisher as the manager), but I’d never use it on a server due to it not being POSIX compliant.
I use Linux for work and I’m pretty much fully in bash. What’s the benefit of changing to a different shell? Will all my scripts still work?
Power, convenience, customizability
Pretty much the same reasons you use Linux at all
Zsh is just bash with plugins and stuff, so regular bash scripts work. fish, as I understand, uses its own language.
That’s right. zsh is POSIX compliant while fish is not. That’s the reason I switched to zsh from fish.
Bash code is not safe to run as if it were Zsh, and Zsh has language features Bash doesn’t. They are different languages.
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I made myself this question and jumped to fish and never came back to bash. I now use mostly the terminal for most things together with ranger.
If you decide to jump to fish install fish + fisherman + fzf
Fisherman for installing themes and plugins and with it you install the fzf plugin. I also have the tide theme which is pretty nice.
PS. Bash scripts still run as bash so there is no conflict.
On Mac, zsh is default.
I use zsh with zinit (with turbo mode) or zgenom.
Zsh quick start kit and z4human (created by powerlevel10k author) are great starts if you do not want to invest on configuring zsh.
I’d like to agree with most of the people here and say that while I have a great local zsh setup, 95% of the time I’m working on some other system in the cloud that only exists for a few days at a time and will only ever have bash and basic vim-enhanced, so I never really get to use my oh-my-zsh setup.
I tried fish and liked it.
But compatibility to bash is not great.
So I changed to zsh with zsh quick start kit (zgen and later zgenom). Zsh has more more community, frameworks and plugins.
Now I roll my own zsh config using zinit with turbo.
I use fish with the bass plugin for any time I need to work with bash scripts.
When you’re working on a remote server you’re probably not going to have fish available.
You’re probably not gonna have zsh either, though, but I wouldn’t recommend using sh as your shell on your personal dev machine 🤷♂️
That’s actually a pretty good reason. Currently I own my work environments but that won’t always be the case, I’m sure.
Fish, it just works. Customization is super simple and has a really nice webui if you’re into that sort of stuff. Plugins are easy to install with fisher. Out of the box it’s very ergonomic and you don’t have to deal with tons of scripts that may need debugging. Custom shell functions take 2 seconds to set up. Scripts use a shebang to specify the shell they run in, so you shouldn’t have any issues with that. Whenever I absolutely need to run a command with bash, I just switch to it, do what I need to do, and hop back to fish. Highly recommend, haven’t looked back since I started using it a few years ago :)
I use zsh with a few customisations. I’ve used fish but it’s sometimes slow so I just stick to zsh.
I learned Fish by helping someone else in a chat. There’s a lot of cool things, and I think it’s an excellent shell. Fish is an excellent choice for a shell.
Zsh is a much more featureful language (with globbing/subscript/PE flags, native floating point arithmetic, the whole
man zshmodules), which doesn’t necessarily make it a better shell. But I like those features, and I find it to be a natural choice to write more complex programs which normally would be a code smell for Bash.The plugin ecosystem for is much larger than Fish’s as well.
Been using fish for awhile. I don’t need much more than smart autocomplete (which is built in) and some small QOL plugins. Sometimes it sucks because the syntax is slightly different than bash or zsh so you will have to get used to that.
I moved to the fish shell a while ago and I love it, everything I need works OOB. I don’t understand people complaining about the different sintax for scripts, this is a non issue, just use #!/bin/bash at the start of your script and it will use bash, or just execute directly with “bash script.sh”.
I don’t understand people complaining about the different sintax for scripts, this is a non issue…
I have a two major reasons:
- Adding another shell syntax adds unnecessary cognitive load and context switching. If I were to use a non-POSIX shell, I’d have to remember another, highly domain-specific language, in addition to BASH/ZSH/SH and need to context switch when writing and debugging shell scripts. Instead, I can spend the mental energy on writing code, and learning new languages and tools.
- Most remote *nix systems run BASH or another POSIX-compliant shell. This introduces additional context switching when administering or debugging remotely.
And as OP puts it, this “sintax” is a sin.
If they’re taxing it now, that’s another reason to to avoid the non-POSIX shell :P
Whoops, I forgot about this tab and now I’m late to the fish party 😅 I used to use customized zsh but have since switched to fish and it’s basically everything I had to work to get zsh to do, only without any of the work. It just is what I want from a shell, I just grab it from the nearest package manager and off I go.
…Unfortunately for fish, that’s made me curious that there may be “another fish” out there somewhere that’s what I’d be struggling to turn fish into if I knew any better than I do now 🤣
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.
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Fish is really good without any configuration, but it’s not POSIX-compatible. Zsh can get very good as well, and it works with most shell scripts, but it requires some setup. I started with fish then moved to zsh.
I daily drive Linux mint and love using fish, I do have a custom built NAS but I rarely ssh into it, so I’m not limited by it, but as some mention that if you’re a dev and do a lot of SSH/remote controlling then it might work against you if you form too many habits.
