• yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca
    11·
    4 hours 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?

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      3 hours 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 I apparently I already ran that exact command months ago and simply forgot.

      • astro@leminal.space
        1·
        20 minutes 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.

    • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      4 hours 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.

  • zen@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    I don’t mind /bin/zsh.

    Now Oh My Zsh! on the other hand can die in a hole.

    • Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet@lemmy.world
      11·
      4 hours ago

      I would really recommend you try fish.

      It has a lot of nice autocomplete features and handles functions much better than bash. It has a very sensible autoconfig so you can just install and try it.

      Zsh can be configured in quite a lot of ways. It’s default config is quite similar to bash.

      • ErenOnizuka@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        4 hours ago

        What does it autocomplete? Filenames? Bash can do that too, right? I just hit the tab key and it’s written there.

        And with functions you mean in scripts? How does it handle functions better?

        • Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 hours ago

          Autocompletions in fish also take history into account, which saves you a lot of typing in the long run.

          Fish shell script is much more sensibly constructed than bash so it’s just much easier to write a script in fish.

    • TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 hours ago

      Features and default settings, but its really just about preference. They are all good at what they do.

      Also im only saying this because it confused me for so long, but shell and terminal are different parts of the same thing. Bash is your shell, its the backend that runs everything you type into your terminal. My computer for example uses my kitty terminal which communicates in bash. You can change both the shell and terminal. Zsh is another shell, so it would change the “shell language” you use to communicate with your terminal.

    • kartoffelsaft@programming.dev
      2·
      4 hours ago

      There can be a ton of reasons, albeit I personally also just stick with default (for me zsh). In typical linux user fashion I also must tell you that bash and zsh are shells, not terminals.

      The two main reasons you’d choose a particular shell is because you prefer it’s configurability or syntax. Zsh has a bunch of features that you can enable and you can configure it to behave basically however you want, like adding spelling correction or multiline editing, but it’s defaults absolutely suck unless your distro comes with a sensible config. Fish, which another guy here’s raved about, goes in basically the opposite direction and is really nice to use out of the box (I haven’t used it though). I hear it’s technically not a valid /bin/sh substitute like zsh or bash because of syntactic differences, but that’d be a whole other rabbit hole if true.

      One other reason can be performance concerns because bash is pretty slow when treated as a programming language, but I’d argue you shouldn’t organize your workflow so that bash is a performance bottleneck.

  • juipeltje@lemmy.world
    10·
    6 hours ago

    I never tried anything other than bash tbh. Not sure if i should. I never really looked into what i might be missing out on with a different shell. Bash just works so i never felt like messing around with it.

    • inzen@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours 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.

    • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      56·
      9 hours 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
      15·
      10 hours 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
        24·
        10 hours ago

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

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

          • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
            24·
            9 hours 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.

          • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            8 hours 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

          • Laser@feddit.org
            8·
            9 hours ago

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

            • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
              14·
              9 hours 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
                2·
                8 hours 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
                1·
                7 hours 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.

          • null@piefed.nullspace.lolEnglish
            2·
            9 hours 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
      4·
      8 hours 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.

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          3 hours 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.

  • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
    28·
    9 hours ago

    I switched from bash to zsh a while ago, mostly just for shits and giggles. I really can’t see any reason to form a strong opinion on it one way or the other.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      34·
      9 hours ago

      Bash is copyleft (GPLv3). Zsh is permissively-licensed.

      Apple, for instance, switched from bash to zsh when the GPL version upgraded because they wanted to withhold those rights from their users.

      Zsh should be considered harmful as a tool of corporate encroachment and subjugation of Free Software.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I went from bash to fish to zsh. I can see why people would like having fish as a shell. but I hated scripting on it and if I’m going to be triggering a different shell for scripts anyway, I might as well skip the middleman, not re-invent the wheel and just use zsh with plug-ins that way I only have two shells installed instead of three. Adding the auto-complete plugin and a theme plugin for zsh gives most of fishes base functionality and design while making it so I don’t nerd to worry about compatibility.

      Maybe someday when I’m less code oriented, I will re-look at fish, but I don’t see it happening in the foreseeable future.

      • cally [he/they]@pawb.socialEnglish
        4·
        5 hours ago

        Yes, I replicated some features of fish in zsh because I liked some parts of fish but I didn’t like the different syntax (not that I’m too familiar with the shell, just familiar enough to get annoyed sometimes when using fish).