Comment on What are the recommended scripting languages for complex shell scripts beyond bash?

• ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m not the person to say anything about zsh vs. fish. I last tried zsh around 2008. Back then I decided to stick with bash over other shells. At the time (and for decades earlier) it was clear that sh was inadequate. So the Bourne Again Shell was (and still is) ubiquitous. Other shells fighting for user space seemed like the xkcd-927 problem.

  Now, I’m basically seeing that if I’m stuck without my .bashrc file, installing fish gives me most of the niceties I like. It also gives me niceties that I wouldn’t have been able to do, like nice multi-lining. And while I personally find fi and esac charming, they are pretty dumb. And I certainly don’t miss the for-do-done construction.

  I bet I would like zsh as much as fish, but I don’t have any motivation to try it.

  fish looks at my path to highlight mistyped commands. It autocompletes on the fly and autocompletes with attention paid to the usage in your history. The coolest thing is that it parses man pages. That allows autocomplete to know the options of a command as long as it has a proper man page (which it just should).

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