What is Fish Shell and what are its top alternatives?
Fish Shell is a powerful and user-friendly command line shell for Unix-like operating systems. It features auto-suggestions as you type, syntax highlighting, powerful scripting capabilities, and a clean and consistent syntax. However, Fish Shell may lack some compatibility with older shell scripts and require users to learn new syntax and commands.
- Bash Shell: Bash is the default shell on many Linux distributions and offers a wide range of features, compatibility with existing scripts, and a large user base. However, it can be less user-friendly and have a steeper learning curve compared to Fish Shell.
- Zsh: Zsh is a highly customizable shell with advanced features like powerful scripting capabilities, extensive plugin support, and robust auto-completion. While it offers more flexibility than Fish Shell, it may require more configuration.
- Oh-My-Zsh: Oh-My-Zsh is a community-driven framework for managing Zsh configurations and plugins, making it easier to customize and enhance your shell experience. Despite its popularity, it may introduce additional complexity and performance overhead.
- PowerShell: Developed by Microsoft, PowerShell is a task automation framework with a command-line shell that integrates with the Windows operating system. It offers extensive scripting capabilities and seamless integration with .NET, but it may lack compatibility with Unix-like systems.
- xonsh: Xonsh is a Python-powered shell that combines the best of both Python and shell scripting. It features syntax highlighting, tab completion, and the ability to run both Python and shell commands seamlessly. However, its performance may be a concern for some users.
- Tcsh: Tcsh is an enhanced version of the C shell with features like command-line editing, history recall, and file name completion. It provides a familiar syntax for C programmers but may lack the modern features and customization options found in Fish Shell.
- Elvish: Elvish is a shell that focuses on discoverability and composability, offering features like a powerful programming language, unified data representation, and interactive completion. While it introduces innovative concepts, its adoption and community support may be limited.
- Dash (_/bin/sh): Dash is a lightweight shell designed for efficient script execution with a focus on POSIX compliance and speed. It is commonly used as the default /bin/sh on Debian-based systems but may lack advanced features and interactive capabilities compared to Fish Shell.
- FISH-derivatives: Fish derivatives are customized versions of Fish Shell that offer additional features, themes, and plugins to enhance the user experience. These derivatives provide a tailored environment for specific use cases but may introduce compatibility issues and maintenance overhead.
- Csh: Csh is a Unix shell with a C-like syntax and features like history recall, job control, and file name completion. It offers a familiar environment for C programmers but may lack the modern conveniences and usability improvements found in Fish Shell.
Top Alternatives to Fish Shell
- iTerm2
A replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with macOS 10.12 or newer. iTerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted. ...
- Shell
A shell is a text-based terminal, used for manipulating programs and files. Shell scripts typically manage program execution. ...
- PowerShell
A command-line shell and scripting language built on .NET. Helps system administrators and power-users rapidly automate tasks that manage operating systems (Linux, macOS, and Windows) and processes. ...
- GNU Bash
The Bourne Again SHell is an sh-compatible shell that incorporates useful features from the Korn shell (ksh) and C shell (csh). It is intended to conform to the IEEE POSIX P1003.2/ISO 9945.2 Shell and Tools standard. ...
- IPython
It provides a rich architecture for interactive computing with a powerful interactive shell, a kernel for Jupyter. It has a support for interactive data visualization and use of GUI toolkits. Flexible, embeddable interpreters to load into your own projects. Easy to use, high performance tools for parallel computing. ...
- Zsh (Z shell)
An interactive login shell, command interpreter and scripting language.
- Tabby
It is an infinitely customizable cross-platform terminal app for local shells, serial, SSH and Telnet connections. ...
- Google Cloud Shell
It is an online development and operations environment accessible anywhere with your browser. You can manage your resources with its online terminal preloaded with utilities such as the gcloud command-line tool, kubectl, and more. You can also develop, build, debug, and deploy your cloud-based apps using the online Cloud Shell Editor. ...
Fish Shell alternatives & related posts
- Themes5
- Tabs2
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Shell
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I currently work helpdesk and have been for about 6 years. I am looking to become more valuable, and I can't decide what route to take? Python is of interest, and so is PowerShell. What are some recommendations? Maybe something that would benefit a helpdesk position or even get into a network administrator.
Objective: I am trying to build a custom service that will create VMs in Azure, based on inputs taken from a web interface. I want the backend code that interacts with Azure to be PowerShell.
Ask: Hoping to find help with deciding the simplest architecture of tools to achieve this.
What I have so far with my Limited Knowledge: I am new to Azure and Jenkins. I arrived at Jenkins coz it can run PowerShell and has API that can be called to trigger a job. Although integrating with it over the web seems problematic since its on-prem network. I hear it is possible using the VPN. For the Web, I hope to use Azure Web App with Python/Node.js that I can manage to make API calls to Jenkins.
Is there a better way? I just need help getting the right directions; I will walk the way.
- Customizable3
- Powerful scripting language3
- Widely adopted2
- Cross platform0
- Too Slow1
related GNU Bash posts
Recently I've switched from GNU Bash to Oh My ZSH and I'm happy with the way I can customize the environment, picking between options by tab and seeing git status or hardware status while typing commands and a beautiful UI that's easy on eyes. Also ability to turn-off case-sensitivity comes in handy. I don't think if I will go back!
Out of curiosity, when my coding instructor for Python did some commands on his computer, he told me learning any sort of terminal command interface (e.g. GNU Bash, PowerShell, Zsh ) will make me understand systems and how computers work and would make me know the basics of systems programming (although I am more into web development). I immediately went curious, out of my time, and looked up some command line interfaces to learn. It gave me bash, shell, zsh, powershell, etc. All these are really confusing, and they all seem the same. I want to be a terminal dweller, so which of the terminal related things should I learn? I think Bash, since it can replace Powershell on Windows, and has all the Linux/macOS systems.
- Interactive exploration then save to a script1
- Persistent history between sessions1
- It's magical are just that1
- Help in a keystroke1
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Jupyter Anaconda Pandas IPython
A great way to prototype your data analytic modules. The use of the package is simple and user-friendly and the migration from ipython to python is fairly simple: a lot of cleaning, but no more.
The negative aspect comes when you want to streamline your productive system or does CI with your anaconda environment: - most tools don't accept conda environments (as smoothly as pip requirements) - the conda environments (even with miniconda) have quite an overhead