fish, the friendly interactive shell, is a commandline shell intended to be interactive and user-friendly.

fish is intentionally not fully POSIX compliant, it aims at addressing POSIX inconsistencies (as perceived by the creators) with a simplified or a different syntax. This means that even simple POSIX compliant scripts may require some significant adaptation or even full rewriting to run with fish.

Source

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
    4·
    23 hours ago

    WIll I be able to take my shell with on to every other computer I meet ? I mean, these things are tiny, but how portable are shells ? I don’t want to learn a bunch of useful custom commands and then become frustrated to do anything on every computer other than mine.

    That’s why I have a qwerty keyboard, I don’t want to become useless whenever I have to use a keyboard that isn’t my keyboard…

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      15 hours ago

      Fish is not the worst in this regard, because:

      • The defaults are pretty good, so you don’t typically need a config file for it to be usable.
      • As of version 4.0, Fish is (experimentally) available as a single executable for download from their GitHub page. So, even on hosts where you can’t install anything, you may still be able to copy that executable file onto there and use it.

      But there may still be situations where it’s annoying, like if you’re working in a container, then you likely don’t want to mount your fish executable every time.

      But I also have to say I don’t find it too big of a deal.
      I still use Bash for scripting (just throw a #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash at the top of your script, like you should anyways), and then for interactive use, not that much of the shell syntax comes into play anyways.
      And if I ever do need to copy a complex Bash command into an interactive shell, I can just run bash, then run the command in there and then exit back out.

    • somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Shell configs are hard to move. Some in $HOME/.config , some in .[idk]rc files, etc.

      It’s messy. Unless you write everything you modify. If you did not do that up to now…good luck moving shell configs.

      • AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        5·
        20 hours ago

        What? No they aren’t hard to move. They’re usually just one file. Copy to your new machine and done.

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
        1·
        21 hours ago

        I have no shell configs of any kind because it seemed like everytime I used another computer, I would not have them and I would end up having the re-learn everything.

        So instead I google every command every time or ask chatgpt, like this

        I find it very annoying there’s isn’t a reliable way to use alias or shells, functions and stuff.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2·
          15 hours ago

          I have no shell configs of any kind because it seemed like everytime I used another computer, I would not have them and I would end up having the re-learn everything.

          What I do is store my dotfiles in a git repository, and leave symlinks to the files in that repository. Then, when I move to another computer, pulling over all my configuration consists of doing a git pull to pull the git repo over and then running a command to set up the symlinks on that new computer. I can also make changes and selectively push things in. Some things need to be specific to a computer, and those don’t go in.

          I use a homebrew script to set up the symlinks. A number of people use GNU stow for this.

          kagis for an example of someone using stow

          https://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html?round=two

          If you edit the symlinks in emacs (and I imagine vim), it picks up on the fact that they’re symlinks into a git repository and that they’re version-controlled.

          So, like:

          • Have a bare git repository on home machine, the “master” copy.

          • Every machine with an account has a non-bare dotfiles git repository checked out and symlinks pointing into that repo.

          • Make any changes on a given machine like you normally would, then git commit them to the local non-bare dotfiles git repo and push them to the master repository.

          • If setting up on a new machine, pull the git repository, and then run the command to set up the symlinks.___