from Hacker News

fish shell

by atldev on 8/16/13, 3:24 PM with 75 comments

  • by dfc on 8/16/13, 4:48 PM

    The fact that you cannot redirect stderr to stdout and pipe to another command is a bit of a stumbling point for me. When I saw the bug[1] for the first time I thought that it must be some strange corner case, but it turns out it is a real bug. After reading the bug report I started to wonder if there were any other other unixy features that were missing. I/O redirection is a core unix concept in my opinion.

    [1] "Redirect stderr to stdout and pipe doesn't work as expected" https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/110

  • by stevelosh on 8/16/13, 3:59 PM

    I've been using fish for a while now. Overall it's pretty great.

    Here's my fish config if you want to see an example: https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/src/tip/fish/config.fish

  • by 9ac345a5509a on 8/16/13, 3:37 PM

    Previous discussions:

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723235
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5567639
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073162

  • by JelteF on 8/16/13, 6:02 PM

    I tried fish, last time it was posted. I quickly abandoned it though.

    One of my main commandline utilities is git in combination with git-flow(amazing). I found the normal git completion lacking. I believe branches didn't get completed correctly in combination with some commands. The git-flow completion was non existent.

    When that changes I might try it again. But for a shell that has tabcompletion as a selling point I was very unimpressed.

  • by appplemac on 8/16/13, 4:46 PM

    One of my favourite features: a single configuration file. No more .bashrc and .bash_profile .

    However, it seems like Fish is not fully POSIX-compatible, therefore you can face weird problems in Vim plugins, for example.

  • by ballard on 8/16/13, 9:20 PM

    For people that just don't care about advanced features or gotchas, fish seems fine.

    For people that exploit redirection, file handle rewiring, here docs and such... consider zsh with https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

  • by matthewlehner on 8/16/13, 3:50 PM

    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.

  • by mmanfrin on 8/16/13, 8:37 PM

    I really liked fish, but as someone who is still learning bash/cli scripting, it makes things difficult when instructions from programs come only in Bash syntax, which does not work well with fish (some things with homebrew were an absolute nightmare to install).

  • by Symmetry on 8/16/13, 7:30 PM

    I've been using fish for a while and have generally been very happy, I'm even working on creating a set of functions for ROS to integrate with fish the way it currently does with bash and zsh. My one tiny gripe is the way that if I

      set foo this that "the other"
    then

      echo $faux; echo $faux[1]
    doesn't produce anything, but

      echo $foo[4]
    gives me an error message that I can't just pipe to /dev/null

    Also, writing autocompletes for functions is both far simpler than in bash, but I'm also missing some of tools that bash provides.

  • by fjcaetano on 8/16/13, 4:06 PM

    Why is this interesting when we have zsh?

    https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh?source=cc

  • by sdfjkl on 8/16/13, 8:14 PM

    Fish is a great interactive shell. I've been using it for some time now.

    A few things I occasionally run into: You can't just paste somebodies setup instructions into your shell anymore (you can temporarily invoke bash for that though). And when writing setup instructions yourself, sh is still pretty much the standard. VirtualEnv generates an activate.fish out of the box - nice! I still occasionally type !grep by accident. And I do miss &&.

  • by d5ve on 8/16/13, 5:30 PM

    I defined the following function to convert my bash aliases to fish functions, which eased my switchover a bit. I saved it as ~/.config/fish/functions/import_bash_aliases.fish

      function import_bash_aliases --description 'bash aliases to .fish function files.'
      for a in (cat ~/.bashrc  | grep "^alias")
          set aname (echo $a | grep -Eoe "[a-z0-9]+=" | sed 's/=//')
          set command (echo $a | sed 's/^alias .*=//' \
            | sed 's/^ *\'//' | sed 's/\' *$//' )
          echo "Processing alias $aname as $command"
          if test -f ~/.config/fish/functions/$aname.fish
              echo Function $aname is already defined. Skipping...
          else
              alias $aname $command
              funcsave $aname
          end
      end
  end

  • by patrickg on 8/16/13, 5:04 PM

    I have been using fish for a few months exclusively on my Mac. I really miss a few bashisms: mostly pressing esc-. inserts the last part of the last command. I have not changed the shell on my server, somehow I am afraid of breaking things... (bad shell scripts that don't have correct shebang line).

  • by mkname on 8/16/13, 7:14 PM

    I just took fish for a quick spin, and... wow -- I am impressed. It really feels "interactive". I don't think I'll replace my battle tested zsh, but even as a "grumpy old man": you should at least try it. It feels really... fresh.

  • by dmotz on 8/16/13, 6:40 PM

    One thing I missed in fish was bash's sudo !! to quickly re-execute a command.

    A replacement is easy enough though and is in my config here: https://github.com/dmotz/dotfiles/blob/master/functions/sudo...

    Beyond a few other syntax incompatibilities, I've enjoyed using it.

  • by 0xACE on 8/16/13, 6:47 PM

    Gave fish a shot for a week or so. It gives some "oohs and ahs" right off the bat, but in the long term, not something that I could use.

    Maybe if it was at least somewhat bash or POSIX compatible I would be on board, but the developers don't even seem to want to help us out in that regard.

  • by reledi on 8/16/13, 10:37 PM

    I've been using fish for about 3 months now and I love it. Switched from bash.

    Here's a presentation I gave to my local coder community on fish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWmKfb2jQhU

  • by cwp on 8/16/13, 11:59 PM

    "Finally, a command line shell for the 90s"

    Now that's an odd slogan. Is it trying to make the point that the competition is even older? Appeal to old-school hackers? Subtly tell me that the project hasn't been updated in a while?

  • by atldev on 8/16/13, 3:26 PM

    See it in action here: http://youtu.be/MVw8N3hTfCI?t=56s

  • by tuananh on 8/16/13, 4:17 PM

    the developer should provider a converter tool to convert .bashrc/.zshrc to fish config

  • by aidenn0 on 8/17/13, 5:22 AM

    fish: the shell for people who want to use multi-line echo instead of here-docs.

  • by pit on 8/16/13, 5:05 PM

    Oooh, it's like a MUD!

  • by hrkristian on 8/16/13, 3:59 PM

    I like auto-complete in web-browsers, but I can't see a single use for it in my terminals. After all, what Linux-user hasn't automated their terminal input to some degree? Nah, I'll stick with my [TAB]...