When you’re working on a remote server you’re probably not going to have fish available.

I use fish because I have better things to do than tweak my shell configuration and debug shell plugins.

When I tried oh-my-zsh and prezto (I think?) they came with tons of plugins that performed badly and made it hard to get things done (specifically, they ran git status synchronously on every new prompt, which does not work well in a moderately large repo). Fish had similar features but wasn’t horribly slow, so I use it.

I use Fish shell and while it is pretty nice on its own, the fact that it is non-standard does cause problems. Many times you will search for something online and you’ll find nice bash results, which either you will have to execute directly in bash or modify to work correctly in Fish.

I don’t think all of Fish’s design choices are the best, either. But for an OOTB experience, it is nicer than either Bash or Zsh.

Let the religious shell wars begin … again

Only right answer is of course TCSH. Not much documentation and support, ancient but still receives new bugs in 2021 (on Debian), but attackers hate it! (I love it)

My real suggestion is to learn zsh and fish (and bash). Try using them for all your purposes and in the end you will automatically find the one (or more of them) that suits you best and that you like most for your daily tasks.

I like zsh with oh-my-zsh and Powerlevel10k. This gives me a clear indication of which system I am on and remains POSIX-compliant.

The biggest deal breaker for me for shells like fish are the they are not POSIX-compliant and I need to use remote systems regularly. Doesn’t make sense to use something with a different syntax to me.

Still a bash lover after 24 years at the command line. 😄

If you want you can install starship, which provides a lot of the nifty prompt customization I see in other people’s zsh configs. I’ve been using it with bash for a few months now and like it a lot.

An old sysadm introduced me to zsh 28 years ago now and I’ve used it as my primary shell ever since. It’s tried, tested and most certainly works well.

Genuinly asking, what is wront/lacking in bash?

I use zsh with a few customisations. I’ve used fish but it’s sometimes slow so I just stick to zsh.

bash with ble.sh! I’m a former fish user, and ble.sh replicates all of fish’s quality of life improvements (that I used, at least) and then some, all with a single source command in my .bashrc. And it’s still bash at the end of the day, so online resources to tweak and modify it all still work.

I use Linux for work and I’m pretty much fully in bash. What’s the benefit of changing to a different shell? Will all my scripts still work?

I used zsh for ages but switched to fish a few months ago because its navigation features are amazingly smooth and seamless. I generally write scripts in sh or python so navigation is the most important part of the terminal for me. Fish has bash compatibility plugins if you need them, but the main reason I use it is that it’s the nicest feeling shell to use for getting around in a terminal that I’ve found so far.

That counts for a lot.

I learned Fish by helping someone else in a chat. There’s a lot of cool things, and I think it’s an excellent shell. Fish is an excellent choice for a shell.

Zsh is a much more featureful language (with globbing/subscript/PE flags, native floating point arithmetic, the whole man zshmodules), which doesn’t necessarily make it a better shell. But I like those features, and I find it to be a natural choice to write more complex programs which normally would be a code smell for Bash.

The plugin ecosystem for is much larger than Fish’s as well.

I daily drive Linux mint and love using fish, I do have a custom built NAS but I rarely ssh into it, so I’m not limited by it, but as some mention that if you’re a dev and do a lot of SSH/remote controlling then it might work against you if you form too many habits.