Fish shell
Fish shell, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
You give me the glory of autosuggestions with nary a line of config.
Your default prompt has all my favorite things.
Your command history stretches to the beginning of time.[1] I considered Atuin, but why bother when I have you?
Your tab completion is my tireless assistant, searching and suggesting without distracting.[2]
Your scripting language is a pleasant escape from murk of bash. POSIX be damned![3]
Your builtin syntax highlighting forestalls my otherwise steady stream of user errors.
Abbreviations, your improvement on bash aliases, expand when you type them, letting me know exactly what I’m running and popping the command into your history for posterity. And you have more bash-like aliases for those that want them.
You are the first thing I install on a new machine. Let’s grow old together.
For more praise from smarter peeps, see:
- Julia’s post, The fish shell is awesome.
- Her followup, Reasons I still love the fish shell.
- See also the HN discussion. Top comment: “I adore fish and can’t imagine ever switching back to zsh or bash.”
- Paul’s post, The fish shell is amazing.
- The HN thread, Command line tools for productive programmers. Top comment: “The single best improvement to my command-line workflow I’ve done in the last few years has been switching shells [to fish].”
(Email me more good stuff to add here and I’ll do it!)
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