zsh or fish for an intermediate Linux user?

I use fish because I have better things to do than tweak my shell configuration and debug shell plugins.

When I tried oh-my-zsh and prezto (I think?) they came with tons of plugins that performed badly and made it hard to get things done (specifically, they ran git status synchronously on every new prompt, which does not work well in a moderately large repo). Fish had similar features but wasn't horribly slow, so I use it.

When you’re working on a remote server you’re probably not going to have fish available.

I use Fish shell and while it is pretty nice on its own, the fact that it is non-standard does cause problems. Many times you will search for something online and you'll find nice bash results, which either you will have to execute directly in bash or modify to work correctly in Fish.

I don't think all of Fish's design choices are the best, either. But for an OOTB experience, it is nicer than either Bash or Zsh.

Let the religious shell wars begin ... again

Only right answer is of course TCSH. Not much documentation and support, ancient but still receives new bugs in 2021 (on Debian), but attackers hate it! (I love it)

My real suggestion is to learn zsh and fish (and bash). Try using them for all your purposes and in the end you will automatically find the one (or more of them) that suits you best and that you like most for your daily tasks.

I like zsh with oh-my-zsh and Powerlevel10k. This gives me a clear indication of which system I am on and remains POSIX-compliant.

The biggest deal breaker for me for shells like fish are the they are not POSIX-compliant and I need to use remote systems regularly. Doesn't make sense to use something with a different syntax to me.

I moved to the fish shell a while ago and I love it, everything I need works OOB. I don't understand people complaining about the different sintax for scripts, this is a non issue, just use #!/bin/bash at the start of your script and it will use bash, or just execute directly with "bash script.sh".

If you’re looking for a nicer shell for personal use, fish is pretty nice

If you want to run arbitrary scripts and deal with setup scripts from coworkers etc, you’ll want to fall back to zsh/bash regularly, though

If you’re fine with understanding when your shell is the problem, fish is nice for interactive use

I use Linux for work and I'm pretty much fully in bash. What's the benefit of changing to a different shell? Will all my scripts still work?

If you want you can install starship, which provides a lot of the nifty prompt customization I see in other people's zsh configs. I've been using it with bash for a few months now and like it a lot.

Still a bash lover after 24 years at the command line. 😄

I use zsh with a few customisations. I’ve used fish but it’s sometimes slow so I just stick to zsh.

Genuinly asking, what is wront/lacking in bash?

bash with ble.sh! I'm a former fish user, and ble.sh replicates all of fish's quality of life improvements (that I used, at least) and then some, all with a single source command in my .bashrc. And it's still bash at the end of the day, so online resources to tweak and modify it all still work.

ZSH, ZSH, ZSH! Fish is not POSIX compliant, meaning most shell scripts won't work and it has its own special snowflake syntax.

Also, don't use Oh-My-ZSH! Just use the package manager in your system.

An old sysadm introduced me to zsh 28 years ago now and I've used it as my primary shell ever since. It's tried, tested and most certainly works well.

I tried fish and liked it.

But compatibility to bash is not great.

So I changed to zsh with zsh quick start kit (zgen and later zgenom). Zsh has more more community, frameworks and plugins.

Now I roll my own zsh config using zinit with turbo.

I used zsh for ages but switched to fish a few months ago because its navigation features are amazingly smooth and seamless. I generally write scripts in sh or python so navigation is the most important part of the terminal for me. Fish has bash compatibility plugins if you need them, but the main reason I use it is that it's the nicest feeling shell to use for getting around in a terminal that I've found so far.

That counts for a lot.

I daily drive Linux mint and love using fish, I do have a custom built NAS but I rarely ssh into it, so I'm not limited by it, but as some mention that if you're a dev and do a lot of SSH/remote controlling then it might work against you if you form too many habits.

I learned Fish by helping someone else in a chat. There's a lot of cool things, and I think it's an excellent shell. Fish is an excellent choice for a shell.

Zsh is a much more featureful language (with globbing/subscript/PE flags, native floating point arithmetic, the whole man zshmodules), which doesn't necessarily make it a better shell. But I like those features, and I find it to be a natural choice to write more complex programs which normally would be a code smell for Bash.

The plugin ecosystem for is much larger than Fish's as well.

All of those are good choices with different trade-offs. I am a long time zsh user but I'd say stick with bash until you feel strongly enough about your preferences to evaluate the other options for yourself.

Give me fish or give me vanilla bash.

Fish is really good without any configuration, but it's not POSIX-compatible. Zsh can get very good as well, and it works with most shell scripts, but it requires some setup. I started with fish then moved to zsh.

Depending on your use case. I personally use zsh and oh-my-zsh but you can always customize bash to be more like zsh, have auto completion, etc.

I use a mix of fish and nu depending on what I'm doing. NuShell is great but still pretty buggy, so I use fish as my default and switch to it when I want to use its features.

I still write most of my stuff in bash however since servers I work with typically only have bash, and so are potential coworkers.

But locally I see no point restricting myself to a POSIX compatible shell, especially for interactive shells. The easier and faster it is to use and customize the better. Being able to parse and use JSON and CSV and other things easily and natively right in the shell is a major quality of life improvement!

I’d like to agree with most of the people here and say that while I have a great local zsh setup, 95% of the time I’m working on some other system in the cloud that only exists for a few days at a time and will only ever have bash and basic vim-enhanced, so I never really get to use my oh-my-zsh setup.

Fish, it just works. Customization is super simple and has a really nice webui if you're into that sort of stuff. Plugins are easy to install with fisher. Out of the box it's very ergonomic and you don't have to deal with tons of scripts that may need debugging. Custom shell functions take 2 seconds to set up. Scripts use a shebang to specify the shell they run in, so you shouldn't have any issues with that. Whenever I absolutely need to run a command with bash, I just switch to it, do what I need to do, and hop back to fish. Highly recommend, haven't looked back since I started using it a few years ago :)

Whoops, I forgot about this tab and now I'm late to the fish party 😅 I used to use customized zsh but have since switched to fish and it's basically everything I had to work to get zsh to do, only without any of the work. It just is what I want from a shell, I just grab it from the nearest package manager and off I go.

...Unfortunately for fish, that's made me curious that there may be "another fish" out there somewhere that's what I'd be struggling to turn fish into if I knew any better than I do now 🤣

Are you in a tech support role at work? If so are you supporting Linux boxes, either servers or desktops? If yes then stick with BASH and learn VI - not because it is better, but because it comes with almost every distro (a small number install nano instead). If not, try out all the new stuff and see what suits you.

Been using fish for awhile. I don’t need much more than smart autocomplete (which is built in) and some small QOL plugins. Sometimes it sucks because the syntax is slightly different than bash or zsh so you will have to get used to that.

I use zsh with prezto plugins which makes it behave exactly like fish, except it works with batch scripts. It's perfect

So, initially I stuck to bash and tried to get improved functionality through ble.sh etc. However, for reasons unknown to me, it always seemed to be a buggy mess that was prone to break. Eventually I switched after breaking one last time, where I only had installed ble.sh on a fresh/stock bash; which was the primary contributor that made bash bearable. So if I couldn't use ble.sh, I had no reason to stick to it.

When faced with the choice of where to go next, I quickly dismissed fish for not being POSIX-compliant. Furthermore, as bash is standard on Linux, so too is zsh standard on macOS. And that enables it to have legs beyond fish. However I also kept fish in mind as somewhat of a last resort if all else failed.

So I began venturing into zsh and was obviously overwhelmed by the myriad of plugins and plugin-managers. People generally go out and somehow stick to ohmyzsh, however it was clearly poorly managed and couldn't quite deal with the feature-creep in an elegant way.

Many plugin-managers have come out over the years as alternatives that promised to resolve those issues. However, while some of them succeeded initially, they weren't able to keep that up throughout their lifespan.

When I almost lost hope and had started to gravitate towards learning how I should manage my plugins on my own without any plugin-managers I stumbled upon ZSH Quickstart Kit. Which is a project that's clearly well-maintained and offered must-have functionality like automatically updating the the plugin-manager, plugins and more while still trying to maintain a high standard of reliability, performance, customization and minimalism. So obviously I had been sold on it and the rest has been history.

Ultimately it's for you to decide whichever one of the two suits you best. But if you gave zsh a try and wasn't quite sold on ohmyzsh or any of the other plugin-managers out there, then perhaps consider ZSH Quickstart Kit.

Don't know how much "minor customization" is to you, but perhaps try adding some major stuff before giving up on it. Personally I started with prezto, customised it, and added a few things like fzf. Fish is probably nice too but I haven't got around to giving it a fair try.

Both are good (and Bash too). Try them all and choose the best one depending on the context. For example, on my main PC I use fish with a few plugins (and fisher as the manager), but I'd never use it on a server due to it not being POSIX compliant.