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Fish is pretty sweet. The biggest annoyance IMHO is that you have to use env to set environment variables inline to execution.


My biggest issue with fish is that it has no way of letting me kludge the last command like bash does. I have muscle memory for bash shorthands like !$ For last word of the last command I executed or !! For the whole line.

It still catches me out with its sub shells too sometimes. ( () is equiv to $() in bash )

Also. No control+R

Otherwise I think it's a beautiful shell and I keep using it.


The fish philosophy is that instead of "!!" you can use the up arrow to bring up the last command from history and then edit it directly.

And the up arrow already does something similar to ctrl-R by default. No need to have a separate hotkey for that behavior.


> Also. No control+R

What would control+R do for you that isn't just part of the fish autocompletion?


I don't think the env thing is that big of a problem with Fish. For me, the most annoying thing is that it doesn't interoperate well with programs that output POSIX shell strings that you are expected to eval. One particularly annoying example is pkg-config.


Agreed, this isn't that annoying; i largely have no issues with fish at all.

However, I particularly found it difficult to get working with nix, unfortunately.


I tried fish for a while some years ago, and left it when I noticed that its pipes were fake. Second command in a pipeline couldn't read any input until first command finished running. That made it useless for things like `strace ... | grep ...`. Trying it now, it seems they've fixed that.

I remember that I was interested in it for its multiline command formatting and history. Since then, though, I've learned that zsh also has support for multiline command history, and its vi keybindings support multiline editing for a single command. It's like every command line is a little multiline vi buffer. For this reason, I've chosen my prompt so that the command starts at the first column.


Been a fan of fish mostly for its typeahead autocompletion. I do miss that it doesn't have some of the Bash features others have mentioned, but it's a feature I haven't been able to replicate in other shells yet.




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