this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Lovely OOTB defaults. I basically change nothing except the theme.
Autocomplete, git context, etc. The QOL stuff you'd expect.
oh interesting. will give it a shot. basically sounds like zsh plus omz?
Be aware that fish isn't a POSIX-compatible shell enough, so you have to adjust syntax.
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
shscript". Bash is compliant. Zsh is partially compliant and needs to set an option to emulatesh. Fish uses a different syntax and is not compliant; if that is a problem, don't executeshscripts 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$SHELLinstead. That is no longer the case as virtually every Unix-like system's program loader supports#!.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.
That's why it's a shell for the 90s and not the 80s
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.
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
I never managed to learn bash's ways in my first decade of using it, learning fish a decade ago was easy by comparison. So much more human readable and sensible and consistent. Even though fish is the friendly interactive shell, I now use it for all my scripting too.
That was the exact opposite with fish. I had already gotten fairly well first with bash by the time I started using it, and the way fish did it was just super counterintuitive to me.
I couldn't get into the overall design of how it looked and I disliked how command substitution and the built in's worked, Combined with the fact that it's a lesser used shell, so there's less information available on it. I just couldn't do it.
You brought up a point though. That makes me ask. You must not have to share your scripts with anyone then, right? Fish has a very small user base in comparison to ZSH and Bash and when I make a script that's more advanced I tend to want to share it with my friends and having them install a whole new shell just to run a script is just not helpful to me. ZSH is close enough to bash in compatibility that, generally speaking, if I want to share it, I can use zsh And then convert the minor discrepancies. Where with fish I have to redo the entire script.
thanks for the detail!!
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,
chshand I'm all set.does fish have fuzzy reverse hostory search?
Looks like that is indeed the default option