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The friendly interactive shell - Default branch
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Sections: Mac OS X, Unix
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| Added: Sun, Feb 13th 2005 12:50 UTC (3 years, 8 months ago) |
Updated: Sat, Jan 12th 2008 23:47 UTC (9 months, 4 days ago) |
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About:
fish, the friendly interactive shell is a shell that is focused on
interactive use, discoverability, and user friendliness. The design
goal of fish is to give the user a rich set of powerful features in
a way that is easy to discover, remember, and use. fish features a
user-friendly and powerful tab-completion, including descriptions of
every completion, tab-completion of strings with wildcards, and many
completions for specific commands. It also features an extensive and
discoverable help system. A special help command gives access to all the
fish documentation in your preferred Web browser. Other features include
syntax highlighting with extensive error checking, support for the X
clipboard, smart terminal handling based on terminfo, an easy to search,
no duplicates history.
Author:
liljencrantz [contact developer]
Homepage:
http://fishshell.org
Tar/GZ:
http://fishshell.org/files/1.23.0/fish-1.23.0.tar.gz
Tar/BZ2:
http://fishshell.org/files/1.23.0/fish-1.23.0.tar.bz2
Changelog:
http://fishshell.org/ChangeLog
RPM package:
http://fishshell.org/files/1.23.0/fish-1.23.0-0.i386.rpm
Debian package:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/shells/fish
Trove categories:
[change]
Dependencies:
[change]
ncurses (optional)
[download links]
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» Rating:
8.64/10.00
(Rank N/A)
» Vitality: 0.09% (Rank 1687)
» Popularity: 3.98% (Rank 1004)
 
(click to enlarge graphs)
Record hits: 49,424
URL hits: 17,162
Subscribers: 89
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Branches
Comments
[»]
Too bad ...
by poison - Oct 24th 2005 04:53:20
It can't simply be used as a drop-in replacement for
bash
=/
I like it so much ...
--
On the subject of C program indentation:
"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs
should be
indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
-- Blair P. Houghton
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Re: Too bad ...
by liljencrantz - Oct 24th 2005 07:40:30
> [Too bad...] It can't simply be used as a drop-in replacement for
bash
> =/
> I like it so much ...
Yep. The problem is that if fish emulated the Posix/bash syntax, you
probably wouldn't like it half as much, since it would be a much worse
shell.
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good to help people reach the shell
by Claudio - Mar 7th 2005 16:51:10
I think fish is a good starting shell for people that would be a little
scared by bash.
I will suggest this to my girlfriend (who is using KDE but is still
frightened by the shell).
Thanks for developing this,
Claudio
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Re: good to help people reach the shell
by liljencrantz - Mar 8th 2005 09:35:53
>
> I think fish is a good starting shell
> for people that would be a little scared
> by bash.
>
> I will suggest this to my girlfriend
> (who is using KDE but is still
> frightened by the shell).
>
> Thanks for developing this,
>
> Claudio
>
Thanks. I hope that fish is much easier to learn than bash, though I'm
sure the documentation could be even friendlier.
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zsh? :)
by Michael Shigorin - Feb 27th 2005 08:54:31
Hm, but what's missing in zsh or bash-completion to
start Yet Another Shell?
--
Michael Shigorin
mike SOMEWHERE AT altlinux PLUS DOT org
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Re: zsh? :)
by liljencrantz - Feb 28th 2005 02:02:19
> Hm, but what's missing in zsh or
> bash-completion to start Yet Another
> Shell?
Good question. I started writing fish because of two missing features. Tab
completion of strings containing wildcards and syntax highlighting. The
first one is (to me at least) obviously useful, while the second one only
becomes useful if you start thinking about flaging errors red, so you can
see a lot of misspelled words before executing the command.
To do the first one, one would have to rewrite both the completion system
and the globbing system, both of which are large, hairy beasts. To do the
second one, one would have to connect the parser with the editor, which
might be doable in zsh, but since bash uses an external editor (readline),
this becomes a huge hairy mess. So I started out wanting to write a small,
simple test shell to see if those two features where nice.
After implementing them, I thought that they were worthwhile, so I looked
at the bash sourcecode. Yikes! I really do NOT belive in throwing away old
code and starting from scratch, but I'd say it is impossible to rewrite a
major part of bash without first implementing at least one other shell so
you know what the issues are. There are lots of comments in the source
which amount to "Does this really work? What does it do?", and though large
parts of the code are pretty well written and commented, there are huge
chunks of hairy, strange and uncommented code. I suspect that some of the
bash maintainers that have come and gone over the years liked to write
unmaintanable, ugly and uncommented code, and that later maintainers have
tried to stay away from large portions of the codebase. I also suspect that
there are huge amount of code duplication, but since the code makes my eyes
bleed, it's kind of hard to be sure.
In hindsight, maybe I should have watched zsh more closely, since several
of the features I've added to fish since are also present in zsh. But apart
from the ones described above, fish also has features like a clever
MATLAB-like command history, (slightly) better job notification and a cool
pager for tab completions. Also, many of the features that are in fish and
in zsh are disabled by default in zsh. I did not know about them until
after releasing fish, since they are kind of hard to find. :-/
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Re: zsh? :)
by Michael Shigorin - Feb 28th 2005 03:17:24
*sigh*
Same old story of same old code... thanks for clearing up, hope that my
"anti-dup" comment didn't hurt you but maybe helped to have another look
;-)
--
Michael Shigorin
mike SOMEWHERE AT altlinux PLUS DOT org
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Re: zsh? :)
by liljencrantz - Feb 28th 2005 06:38:28
> *sigh*
>
> Same old story of same old code...
> thanks for clearing up, hope that my
> "anti-dup" comment didn't hurt you but
> maybe helped to have another look ;-)
Yeah, I want to add the new features in fish to bash since I obviously
want people to use my code. But beside the problem of strange source code,
there is also another issue. I hope I'm wrong, but I have a sneaking
suspicion that stability is so important in bash that it is nearly
impossible to add features that would change a large part of the codebase,
since there is no hardware to test new releases on. I also suspect that
most distros wouldn't dream of switching from bash as the default shell.
This combination makes it extremely hard to innovate when it comes to
shells.
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Re: zsh? :)
by Michael Shigorin - Feb 28th 2005 06:47:26
> I also suspect that most distros wouldn't dream of
> switching from bash as the default shell.
Well I'd vote for zsh being default shell in ALT Linux -- for
non-minimalistic (interactive at least :) systems, that is. ALT isn't
first-tier distro but still I like it very much for the team and quiet
convenience in many places around the package base.
And I'd do so exactly for zsh's gentle completion and care for tired
people doing things like "rm * ~" with no stinkin' "-i" aliases in.
If only UTF-8 locales (multibyte input) would get proper treatment
there...
--
Michael Shigorin
mike SOMEWHERE AT altlinux PLUS DOT org
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Re: zsh? :)
by liljencrantz - Apr 8th 2005 04:33:04
>
> % I also suspect that most distros
> wouldn't dream of
> % switching from bash as the default
> shell.
>
>
> Well I'd vote for zsh being default
> shell in ALT Linux -- for
> non-minimalistic (interactive at least
> :) systems, that is. ALT isn't
> first-tier distro but still I like it
> very much for the team and quiet
> convenience in many places around the
> package base.
>
> And I'd do so exactly for zsh's gentle
> completion and care for tired people
> doing things like "rm * ~" with no
> stinkin' "-i" aliases in.
>
> If only UTF-8 locales (multibyte input)
> would get proper treatment there...
You would vote for zsh becoming the default interactive shell for most
distributions and so would most users of zsh. If zsh was configured to look
like bash by default, most bash users would also be happier, since zsh is a
much nicer shell for interactive use. But distros aren't switching. I guess
they are a conservative bunch.
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Re: zsh? :)
by Michael Shigorin - Apr 8th 2005 04:39:43
> You would vote for zsh becoming the
> default interactive shell for most
> distributions and so would most users of
> zsh.
Exactly what was discussed recently regarding ALT Linux.
> But distros aren't switching. I guess they
> are a conservative bunch.
Well we'll see -- quite a few core team members here just use zsh.
:-)
There are issues though, both with non-controversial defaults (e.g. shell
pattern substitution in interactive mode) and UTF8 support. Will take some
consideration and time at least...
--
Michael Shigorin
mike SOMEWHERE AT altlinux PLUS DOT org
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Re: zsh? :)
by Iain Cheyne - Nov 26th 2007 06:10:07
> I did not know about
> them until after releasing fish, since
> they are kind of hard to find. :-/
I was using Fish before I learnt about zsh, and its simplicity is far more
attractive than the configuration madness of zsh.
--
Iain Cheyne
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