Switching from zsh to fish

tl;dr How easy is it to switch from zsh to fish ? Is it worth it ?

Background

In the beginning … there was bash and all was good.

The built-in OSX terminal catered to my needs whenever I had to wander into shell land.

The Road to Enlightenment

But when I started hearing about iTerm2, themes (Solarized, Tomorrow, etc.) and dotfiles (Github dotfiles, Holman dotfiles, etc.), there was only one possible outcome: zsh.

And I embraced oh-my-zsh.

The almost infinite amount of themes, functionality I never knew I needed until I used it (z, history substring search, syntax highlighting, etc.) made me feel at home.

Bash was just a kindergarten kid compared to my new and all-mighty shell.

I heard some rumors about this shell with a funny name, took a look at the website and said, hey … zsh does all that already ! You shall not pass !

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler

The thing is … I strive to simplify my work environment as much as I can.

As great as oh-my-zsh is, it brings a lot of baggage. If you want to customize, you need to dig deeper and dedicate a fair amount of time to make it work exactly the way you want.

When I double checked the fish documentation, it promised a lot of built-in functionality with minimal fuss if you wanted to extend and customize.

Was that really the case ?

Only one way to find out.

The Red pill

I took the easy route

$ brew install fish

Right out of the box, you get syntax highlighting, command muted suggestion, history substring search

.zshrc is nowhere to be found, instead you have .config/fish/config.sh, which is very similar, only the syntax changes.

This is my config.fish

set -x PATH /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin $HOME/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin

set -x GOROOT /usr/local/opt/go/libexec
set -x GOPATH ~/code

# fuxor git to non-interactively merge commits

set -x GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT no

# Set where to install casks

set -x HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS "--appdir=/Applications"

# Setup terminal, and turn on colors

set -x TERM xterm-256color
set -xU LS_COLORS "di=34:ln=35:so=32:pi=33:ex=31:bd=34;46:cd=34:su=0:sg=0:tw=0:ow=0:"

# Enable color in grep

set -x GREP_OPTIONS '--color=auto'
set -x GREP_COLOR '3;33'

set -x LESS '--ignore-case --raw-control-chars'
set -x PAGER 'less'
set -x EDITOR 'nano'

set -x LANG en_US.UTF-8
set -x LC_CTYPE "en_US.UTF-8"
set -x LC_MESSAGES "en_US.UTF-8"
set -x LC_COLLATE C

source functions/z.fish

Two notes:

• I always

  $ brew install coreutils

and put the GNU versions of the core commands first in the path. That’s why I set the LS_COLORS environment variable, rather than the LSCOLORS that you would normally use in OSX.

• I currently hold some miscellaneous scripts in ~/bin, which I then put in my path for quick access. In the future, I will symlink those scripts to /usr/local/bin, so I won’t need to add $HOME/bin in my PATH env var.

Extension and customization is achieved via a common path: functions and more elegantly, autoloading functions.

So, aliases are no more, instead you declare a function inside self contained file in ~/.config/fish/functions.

Very simple and very elegant.

These are the functions I currently have:

• fish_prompt.fish | customizes my prompt
• gpl.fish | prints a pretty git log
• hal.fish | ssh’s to one of my servers
• l.fish | is a shortcut to ls -al –color=always
• mkd.fish | creates a dir and cd’s to it
• skynet | ssh’s to one of my servers
• wopr | ssh’s to one of my servers
• z.fish | is fish’s version of z (you can find it here)

This is my prompt (a slightly modified clearance theme that you can find here)

# name: clearance

# ---------------

# Based on idan. Display the following bits on the left:

# - Virtualenv name (if applicable, see https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish)

# - Current directory name

# - Git branch and dirty state (if inside a git repo)

function \_git_branch_name
echo (command git symbolic-ref HEAD ^/dev/null | sed -e 's|^refs/heads/||')
end

function \_git_is_dirty
echo (command git status -s --ignore-submodules=dirty ^/dev/null)
end

function \_remote_hostname
echo (whoami)@(hostname)
end

function fish_prompt
set -l cyan (set_color cyan)
set -l yellow (set_color yellow)
set -l red (set_color red)
set -l blue (set_color blue)
set -l green (set_color green)
set -l normal (set_color normal)
set -l mywhite (set_color -o white)
set -l mygreen (set_color -o green)

set -l cwd $blue(pwd | sed "s:^$HOME:~:")

set -l dove $mygreen (pwd | sed "s:^$HOME:~:")

set -l whowheredate '[' $mywhite (_remote_hostname) $normal ' ' (date "+%H:%M") '] '

# Output the prompt, left to right

# Add a newline before new prompts

echo -e ''

# [email protected] time

echo -n -s $whowheredate

# Print pwd or full path

echo -n -s $dove $normal

# Show git branch and status

if [ (_git_branch_name) ]
set -l git_branch (\_git_branch_name)

    if [ (_git_is_dirty) ]
      set git_info '(' $yellow $git_branch " ±" $normal ')'
    else
      set git_info '(' $green $git_branch $normal ')'
    end
    echo -n -s ' ' $git_info $normal

end

# Terminate with a nice prompt char

echo -e ''
echo -e -n -s '⟩ ' $normal
end

This is gpl.fish

function gpl
git log --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit
end

l.fish

function l
ls -lah --color=always $argv
end

Conclusion

I’m currently using fish as my shell and it has been working great. I definitely recommend it.

I’ve found only one missing functionality: history sharing between sessions.

I generally have a couple tabs open, and fish doesn’t share commands between tabs.

I understand it’s been worked on.

Image Source wembley