Switch to fish shell

I had some free time and decide that I should try different shell, specifically fish. I wanted to try it for a long time, but just wasn’t convinced that time investment worth it.

But the setup went pretty well, quickly I was able to make it work good enough to make it default shell for my user. After two days I was convinced that switch is worth it and I’ve transferred all of my aliases and custom function.

So there’s what hooked me:

• Autosuggestions - fish suggests commands as you type, and shows the suggestion to the right of the cursor, in gray. You can accept all the command from the suggestion with ctrl+f or right or one word ctrl+right.
• Smart autocompletion - fish tries to complete command, argument, or path. Some commands, like git, have even better intellectual completion. If you’re receiving a lot of variants, you can sort them with ctrl+s
• Git prompt - out of the bot fish providesgit-prompt with a lot of customization options, like showing number of untacked file, uncommited changes, shortening branch name and many many more
• History - fish stores all the history with massive 260k entries by default.
• Path abbreviation - if your current path is deep enough, fish will shorten some of the path, so ~/dotfiles/fish will become ~/d/fish.
• Ease of creating keymappings - awesome command bind will let you create fish mappings on-the-fly.
• Smart ** expansion - you could type **.fish to match files in the PWD as well as subdirectories
• Ease of personalization and customization - a lot of tunable variables to define look and behaviour of fish already there. Just set relevant variable or install theme.
• fish-config - utility to open web page, where you can preview your visual changes, behaviour; Examing functions and keybindings.
• Plugin manager - using fisher or oh-my-fish you can easily install utilities, completions, themes.
• Overall purity - fish is very well thought, overall configuration look clean, every command or function is in it’s own file, directory structure is intuitive.

Of course, there’s some downsides:

• Own syntax - not much differences, but you have to get used to it. For example, instead of command you have to use (command).
• Lack of completions for commands - some tools, like kubectl, don’t provide completions. Luckily, community provides completions for the most popular ones, or you can always write you own :-).
• Lags or delays - sometimes it feels not as fast as bash. Mostly on processing large amount of texts. Maybe it’s some configuration or built-in PAGER issues.

I’m pretty happy with the switch and don’t look back.