Fish rules

using nushell is my little rebellion against POSIX tyranny

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…

Nah, fuck that. I’m using yash.

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.

reinstalling Fish right now

Alright:

> /usr/bin/fish --version
fish, version 4.0.1

For whatever reason openSUSE doesn’t ship 4.0.2 despite the fact that it’s in its development repo since months. Oh well, could be worse.

I HIGHLY recommend using bash and zsh as posix-compliant shells at the beginning

Why? All the usual shell scripts don’t use Fish as interpreter.

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.

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.

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.___

This is the way I see it too. Treat “POSIX-compliant” as an adjective and negate it.

Ask the maintainer to push the update to Factory.

No posix compliance is a headache. (Where the hell are my aliases!?)
And also most scripts need to be executed in a posix-compliant shell.

why use aliases (they exist in fish) when you can use abbreviations and your history isnt determined by whatever you set your aliases up as? If you change an alias, your history does not reflect that. If you use abbreviations, your history is perfectly usable

The fuck is an abbreviation? Is it a knock-off alias?

basically a text expansion. I have g=git, so when I type “g push” after I hit space after g, it expands it to git in the terminal as if i just typed out git myself. My history doesnt show “g push” it shows “git push” before I push enter

https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/abbr.html

POSIX shell sucks ass. Just because there are many worse options doesn’t make it any better.

#!/bin/sh #!/bin/bash?

I love my bash-isms.

zsh with oh-my-zsh addon can do the same amount of pretty colours and qol stuff, with the addition of being POSIX compliant. Not that fish is bad or anything, but you don’t want additional troubles with random incompatibility on top of the usual learning curve.

Chaotic lawful.