I use Ubuntu on daily basis as this is the only OS I have installed and I’m a huge fan of this Linux distribution without any doubt.
Ubuntu comes with the insanely popular bash shell. Therefore its natural for us to know how to use it.
Bash has its reputation for being one of the best shells out there for decades but somehow I felt something missing but unfortunately I couldn’t find a better alternative until recently one day Scott Hanselman blogged about it. This was the time when Microsoft and Canonical for the first time ever made it possible to run Ubuntu on top of window 10 natively. No doubt that was a huge step in computing.
So the shell Scott installed on Ubuntu on Wiondows10 is called Fish short for Friendly Interactive Shell. You can find the link to the post and fish in the links section. So after reading his post I went ahead and installed fish on my Ubuntu. After playing around with it I felt this what I wanted and instantly made it my default shell.
It has a bunch of really cool futuristic features like completion, on steroids. you type some letters and you instantly see completions be it you cd’d into a directory, touched a file, ran a script or whatever!
you just type the first letter and it will write the whole line for you, how cool is that!
Its scripting syntax is quite different and is concise like when setting aliases you don’t put the equal sign. If you want to run multiple commands commands in bash you just add two ampersands between them but in fish you have to terminate the previous command with a semicolon then type “and”. It might sound a bit weired to the bash folks but you can get used to it.
bash:
alias mycd="cd ~/somedir"fish:
alias mycd "cd ~/somedir"
Setting configurations in fish is a breeze!! you just type fish_config press enter and boom!! browser pops up and you can customize your fish shell from there!
Fish is gaining popularity day by day. if you want to take fish for a spin install it and see if it fits to your needs.
How Do I Install Fish Shell
macOS
brew install fish
Ubuntu
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-2
&& sudo apt-get update
&& sudo apt-get install fish
Windows
Technically you cannot directly install Fish shell on Windows without using CygWIn, Msys or WSL.
On WSL you can install it like so
sudo apt install fish
Do let me know about your experience with fish. Is it a swim or a drown! in the comments section.
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