Fish Shell - 90s shell for a 90s kid

18th Nov 2023
2 min read

Backstory

Many years ago, in the early days of my professional career, I remember looking over my on-boarding buddy's shoulders. What caught my eye was his terminal, which looked far different from the standard terminal running pure bash. This is how I got introduced to zsh and ohmyzsh.

Many config changes and installed plugins later, I was delighted with my shiny-looking terminal. However, as a chronic distro-hopper, I already started looking for other tools that I haven't heard about.

Fish

Soon I came across fish. I have to admit, I wasn't impressed by the website, but I was more than happy to look past that. And for the better. The main thing that struck me was the out-of-the-box experience. I had everything I ever wanted and more, without a single config change, or a single plugin. Some of these are:

Case insensitive auto-complete
Git integration
Responsiveness

The only real config changes that I eventually made were un-setting the greeting message:

set fish_greeting

and adding a bunch of folders to the path:

set -gx PATH "$HOME/.cargo/bin" $PATH

A long boring time later

And here I am now, in 2023, still completely happy with my fish shell experience. I guess it's just the right amount of features and old-school familiarity that has kept me happy for so long. Or perhaps I'm just getting old 😅.

That being said, I'm sure there are new shiny things on the horizon (like Warp) that I'll give a try, especially now in the times of generative AI.