• boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      11·
      15 hours ago

      Prints out what shell you’re using. Bash is default for most Linux distros. MacOS switched from bash to zsh as their default. Zsh is hella customizable, by default it functions more or less like bash.

      Fish is cool, has neat quality of life features out of the box, but can also break scripts sometimes.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    1 day ago

    Default zsh is just bash, you need to add all the fancy plugins to get it to do cool stuff

    fish is for people who don’t want to spend the time setting it all up and to just get a shell that has most of the QoL fetaures builtin.

        • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          9·
          14 hours ago

          No, they are executed according to the shebang on the first line, which is usually bash. If it is missing, it will default to the current shell.

          • Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            3·
            7 hours ago

            That’s true, but I definitely use fish as my default shell and when it runs a script without shebang it automatically runs it with bash. Thus I assume that’s the fish default to make your scripts work.

        • Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          51·
          15 hours ago

          You don’t even need a proper shebang. Scripts without shebang are executed in bash by fish.

      • daggermoon@lemmy.world
        2·
        17 hours ago

        I tried switching to Nushell but certain things just wouldn’t work so I switched back to zsh. sha512sum wouldn’t work and there’s no native replacement.

        • crater2150@feddit.org
          2·
          7 hours ago

          Isn’t sha512sum a regular binary, that should not depend on the shell at all? What does nushell do that something like that can break o.O

    • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      93·
      2 days ago

      Currently using zsh but I installed fish yesterday to try it out because I’m thinking of switching. All the zsh plugins I have are basically just replicating what fish has by default anyway and fish might do it better.

    • flandish@lemmy.world
      24·
      2 days ago

      what’s fish got? I’m liking zsh here but am always open to a distraction instead of getting work done. :)

      • null@piefed.nullspace.lolEnglish
        38·
        2 days ago

        Lovely OOTB defaults. I basically change nothing except the theme.

        Autocomplete, git context, etc. The QOL stuff you’d expect.

          • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
            32·
            2 days ago

            The main differentiator of fish over everything else is it prioritizes intuitive behavior over backwards compatibility.

            Zsh is to bash as c++ is to c. Most bash scripts and habits will work in zsh, but zsh is just more convenient and has more options. Fish is intentionally different.

            Do I wish fish had existed instead of bash so we had a nicer terminal experience? On the whole, yes. But I also couldn’t be bothered to learn another shell where most of the instructions online won’t be able to help you, and I ended up sticking with zsh.

          • Laser@feddit.org
            152·
            2 days ago

            Be aware that fish isn’t a POSIX-compatible shell enough, so you have to adjust syntax.

            • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
              21·
              2 days ago

              That isn’t incorrect, but it’s not as important as people make it out to be. Linux isn’t certified as POSIX-conformant either.

              People are way too stuck on POSIX regarding Fish specifically, but in shell scripting, POSIX compliance boils down to “can it run a pure sh script”. Bash is compliant. Zsh is partially compliant and needs to set an option to emulate sh. Fish uses a different syntax and is not compliant; if that is a problem, don’t execute sh scripts in Fish.

              POSIX compliance for shell scripts was important in the 80s and 90s when the #! directive wasn’t as commonly implemented and every script might be executed by the user’s $SHELL instead. That is no longer the case as virtually every Unix-like system’s program loader supports #!.

              • Black616Angel@discuss.tchncs.de
                4·
                1 day ago

                I use fish, but sometimes it acts weird. And lots of “just copy and past this command” kind of online solutions I have to put into bash.

                My main irk is when I want to forward a ‘*’ to a program but have to escape it.

              • Laser@feddit.org
                3·
                1 day ago

                It’s a cool shell, I use it as a daily driver (though I’m keeping a close eye on elvish which syntactically is even further away from classic shell), but the comments read like fish is basically zsh. And while zsh is pretty close to bash, fish isn’t.

          • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            5·
            1 day ago

            This is a good way of putting it. It’s essentially ZSH with Autosuggest/complete and a theming agent. At least visual-wise.

            When you get into the scripting and the hot keys aspect of it, they reinvent the wheel and everything is different., Like for example ,!! and other bangs(I think that’s the right word?) like that are not valid on fish, And everything to do with variables is different from adding to your path to setting variables to creating functions. Also checking your error code is going to be different as well as it doesn’t follow the $x style inputs and doesn’t support IFS and globbing works differently.

            TLDR; fish is nice, but If you use it unless you want to relearn an entire type of language, keep your scripts on bash or zsh

            or if you wanna see the bigger differences fish has a dedicated bash transition page

            • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
              1·
              14 hours ago

              I never managed to learn bash’s ways in my first decade of using it, learning fish a decade ago was easy by comparison. So much more human readable and sensible and consistent. Even though fish is the friendly interactive shell, I now use it for all my scripting too.

              • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                11 hours ago

                That was the exact opposite with fish. I had already gotten fairly well first with bash by the time I started using it, and the way fish did it was just super counterintuitive to me.

                I couldn’t get into the overall design of how it looked and I disliked how command substitution and the built in’s worked, Combined with the fact that it’s a lesser used shell, so there’s less information available on it. I just couldn’t do it.

                You brought up a point though. That makes me ask. You must not have to share your scripts with anyone then, right? Fish has a very small user base in comparison to ZSH and Bash and when I make a script that’s more advanced I tend to want to share it with my friends and having them install a whole new shell just to run a script is just not helpful to me. ZSH is close enough to bash in compatibility that, generally speaking, if I want to share it, I can use zsh And then convert the minor discrepancies. Where with fish I have to redo the entire script.

                • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
                  1·
                  2 hours ago

                  I don’t know why small user base is considered as meaning I must not have to share my scripts. Is it like an argumentum populum thing? [“If you build it they will come.” ;D]

                  [I suppose It’s true in a strict interpretation of those words… I don’t have to.]

                  I think I have several on my git repos. [… I have even written a text editor in fish.]

                  Free to use for anyone who wants to.

                  Also, if user base size is a concern, Fish’s user base is growing faster than Bash or ZSH.

                  Installing another shell seems a trivial matter to run something.

                  I install far bigger languages for far less all the time.

                  And conversion [if for some edge case reason you really need to ~ I know not why though] is generally trivial these days… just ask an LLM, if conversion scripts are lacking.

                  As for the less information about it… the online help’s really rather thorough and accessible.

                  I don’t know that quantity over quality would help. It didn’t for me and bash.

                  Unless I missed something, it seems to me that all that remains, is

                  I disliked

                  And that’s of course utterly fine. Free software’s defining point zero, the freedom to use software, includes the freedom to not use. Good to have multiple options to further facilitate that first freedom, catering to more variety of tastes.

          • null@piefed.nullspace.lolEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Yup, very similar! And quite customizable as well if you want to. But the focus is on having, by default, a friendly interactive shell.

            I like that I can spin up a VM, install fish, chsh and I’m all set.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      5·
      2 days ago

      Fish is great if you can’t remember a specific command, or don’t want to type out long filenames/locations, but I dunno if I’d use it as the default.

      I just type “fish” in the terminal if I ever run into a situation where I might get some use from it.

      • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        2·
        14 hours ago

        in my ~/.bashrc

        # if interactive, launch fish
[[ $- != *i* ]] && return || fish

        and

        alias f='fish'

        So fish is my default, and if I ever need bash, it’s already there underneath, just a Ctrl-d keybind away to fall back on, and if I want to get back into fish, it’s just a f & RETURN away.

        Seems better to have all the convenience of fish up front. All the completion magic. I so rarely have to type much at all.

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          I have that occasionally when I want to copy a complex bash command from somewhere. But yeah, I can then just run bash, run the command in there and then exit back out of there.

            • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              1 day ago

              I’m guessing, you mean this then: https://github.com/edc/bass

              But well, I was rather thinking of when it’s using Bash-scripting-syntax to combine multiple commands.
              Like, maybe there’s a for-loop in there. You just can’t paste that directly into Fish and have it work. Granted, you should probably put that into a script file, even if you’re using Bash, but yeah, just temporarily launching bash is also an option.

    • inzen@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 day ago

      I jumped from bash to fish because cachy os has it as default. I kinda don’t like it, it’s a little too fancy, but it’s not bad enough for me to bother switching the default to bash. So I’m using it. Still not quite liking it but maybe it’s growing on me.

    • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
      16·
      22 hours ago

      Brave stand, I will stand side by side with you until the first signs of mild resistance or mockery from the world!

      • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
        6·
        16 hours ago

        Well guess what?

        #include <string.h>
#include <iostream>

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
	const int which = strcmp ("zsh", "bash");
	std::cout << which << std::endl;
	return 0;
}

        Output
        1

  • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
    2·
    17 hours ago

    Fish was kinda cool when I tried it, but I don’t really care about the benefits that much. I love Zsh’s effortless customization with Oh My Zsh and the POSIX compatibility.

  • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    I literally do not notice any difference. If the folders and such get the pretty colors and tab works, I could give a damn.

  • yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca
    261·
    1 day ago

    I have never really ever used bash and thought, "Man, I wish my shell was better . . . ". Using ctrl+r to recall past commands, using sudo !! to fix missing permissions and writing small bash scripts all work very well.

    That being said, if you use anything else, and you like it, I’m happy for you, but I do wonder, what leads people to other shells? What problems do they have with bash?

    • crater2150@feddit.org
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I switched to zsh at a time where completion for commands parameters except file paths in bash wasn’t really a thing, you could add some with a script, but they didn’t work well. I’m sure the situation has improved by now, but someone told me recently, there are still no descriptions for the completions. I find it very helpful and it saves me opening a man page a lot of times. For example, typing grep -<Tab> gives me this: 8167

      And now I’m so used to many little features (mostly around the syntax) that wouldn’t be a reason to switch on their own, that I find bash cumbersome to use.

    • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      2·
      14 hours ago

      Try fish for a week, use the online help to familiarise with the completion stuff… see if you still find bash adequate.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      1 day ago

      To me, it genuinely makes a huge difference that I don’t have to manually press Ctrl+R for history search. Because 9 times out of 10, I accept a history suggestion from Fish where I did not think about whether it would be in my history.

      This includes really mundane commands, like cd some/deeply/nested/path/. You would not believe, how often I want to cd into the same directory.
      But I’ve also had it where I started typing a complicated docker run command and Fish suggests the exact command I want to write, because apparently I already ran that exact command months ago and simply forgot.

      • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        2·
        14 hours ago

        Yep, and fish has even more ways to expedite frequent used commands and locations, but because the completion stuff’s so good, it’s easy to never bother setting up abbreviations and keybinds and so on. So many things are often just a couple key presses away, by default, after using it for a while.

      • astro@leminal.space
        12·
        1 day ago

        I used bash for 20 years and, while I obviously knew that there were alternatives, it never seemed necessary to switch. Tried fish on a whim a few months ago and I will never go back.

        • Ben@feddit.dk
          1·
          16 hours ago

          Do you know if fish can input arguments from prevous commands like ESC + . does in bash?

          • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
            2·
            14 hours ago

            Do you know if fish can input arguments from prevous commands like ESC + . does in bash?

            Like Alt-.? (/ Alt - > ).

            Easier in reach, and can cycle through.

            I’ve not got that in my muscle memory yet… so rarely used… had to look that up. Handy. Should use more.

    • phaedrus@piefed.worldEnglish
      1·
      20 hours ago

      I script everything in bash, but for everyday use fish just has some modern QoL things that make it easier to get around. For me, specifically, it’s the way you can recall commands by seeing a ghost version of your history, as you type. You can even scroll through a filtered history if you’re part-way through typing some long command that matches what you have typed.

      Another neat thing, it does it’s best to predict what I want to type and remembers common locations, showing them as ghost text as well.

    • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      i use bash but i also use atuin which makes shell history so much neater. that’s about the only convenience i need in a terminal shell.