I’m moving my posts from Reddit to Lemmy before delete them.
This post is from 2020-09-03.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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The command-line completion features alone are worth it!
Watch this video for a short introduction of some of the features.
I’m not sure if it’s the tides prompt or standard fish, but it shows me a match from my history as I type. So it’ll get more accurate the more I type. Then I’ll just hit control-e and it’ll complete it! I used to use control-r in bash for that, but this is way faster and more fluent. Also, the fzf plugin has a much more useful control-r replacement with fuzzy searches, etc.
The only downside would be the stuff that you know and are used to in bash and have to figure out in fish, or if you need to write any scripts that are POSIX-compliant. But you can still script in bash, of course. Although the fish language is more readable, it’s still a new language to learn. So if you do lots of cool internal functions and loops on the bash command-line all the time, well either learn fish or you start a bash shell and do it there. It’s not like bash suddenly isn’t available anymore.
It's been a while since I've tried zsh, to be honest, but from what I can remember and what I've seen online, is that fish a little bit more "modern" and has sensible defaults out of the box. While you can probably achieve the same with zsh (and probably bash as well, with lots of tweaking), fish is just easier to get up and running as supposed to having zsh and installing some sort of plugin manager such as "oh my zsh" and researching and installing a bunch of things yourself.
My experience with zsh wasn't amazing, maybe because it may have required a bit of tweaking and I didn't feel like it at the time. For fish, I just changed the shell, researched a little about available plugins, and decided I wantef fzf and tide, and that's basically it.
I don't know if either fish or zsh is more customizable, but I'm happy with it. Bottom line appears to be, zsh has been around very long, like bash, but fish is much newer, therefore feels more "modern", whatever that may mean. The flip-side of that is that zsh is a bit more like POSIX-compliant, even though I don't think it really is. So zsh is more like bash than fish is, while offering more features than bash.
Try out both, if you have the time. :) If you don't have the time, go with fish.