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Comment by SomeOldThrow | Hacker News Reader

I'm really surprised they went with zsh rather than fish. I guess they want to preserve the ability for existing `source` scripts to work.

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I think it is mainly because `fish` is incompatible with everything. Most `bash` scripts runs fine in `zsh` (`zsh` has even a `bash` compatibility mode, not necessary generally because rarely `zsh` and `bash` diverges), no `bash` script runs fine in `fish`.

Many of my `bash` scripts run just fine in `fish`, especially since v3 released.

Why would they use fish? Fish is nice and all, but zsh is a much more mainstream shell.

Since when is mainstream better? Why did they choose zsh? They don't justify that either. It's just odd to pick one post-bash shell but not the other when they have very similar feature sets—autocomplete, persistent global variables, attention to end-user quality.

EDIT: apparently zsh doesn't have persistent or global variables, my bad.

Mainstream is often better in terms of unofficial support/learning resources, and by definition better in terms of familiarity/market share. For something like a shell, forcing a niche choice needs justification when it's not clearly better than the alternatives.

Fish is clearly better than the alternatives.

Well, fish is not compatible to bash. Users would suddenly face bash-one-liners that they find on StackOverflow to stop working.

Most Terminal users might not even notice the shell changed from Bash to ZSH. Those same users would notice it, had they changed it to Fish.

> Most Terminal users might not even notice the shell changed from Bash to ZSH.

If that's an argument in favor of ZSH, I think I've missed the point.

It’s an argument in favour of ZSH over Fish. It will cause less disruption, while providing better features than the current default.

> while providing better features than the current default.

Barely—it doesn't address any fundamental issues with bash, it's basically a coat of paint.

It does make sense that tech companies are only into disruption if they can profit from it.

The point is that apple don't want to update bash because they don't want to ship software that uses GPLv3 but they also don't want to keep shipping a decade old version of bash as the default shell, they aren't doing this because they want to improve on bash or anything like that.

There's already a lot of community support available for zsh.

Plenty of developers are using oh-my-zsh either for just the plugin support or for the very popular iterm+powerlevel9k+agnoster theming.

Oh-my-zsh is indeed pretty dang slick

Pro tip: s/powerlevel9k/powerlevel10k/. Same config, same theme, but much faster.

fish is friendly.

And interactive.

And it’s for the 90’s

And crashes all your bash scripts by default.

I literally laughed out loud reading this - thanks... needed a chuckle and a smile about now

fish was written by an Apple engineer.

And? So are lots of other things.

Well maintained by a former Apple engineer

It's really annoying to have to learn new language when zsh is so similar to bash.

It's really annoying to learn bash, so I don't see how that works in zsh's favor.

To be honest I'm hesitant to respond to you because of the level of spittle-flecking you're doing in this thread but I would guess that, by virtue of bash being the standard Mac shell and zsh being a close-enough-but-better replacement, the necessary learning has already happened and overwhelmingly more Mac terminal users will be at least functional with it immediately.

Not the OP, but I agree with both of you actually. It's easier in many ways to run a POSIX-compliant shell with a more "familiar" scripting language to bash users (especially when it comes to running existing scripts or one-liners you find online).... buuuut at the same time I think it's pretty clear that fish's scripting language is much more modern and "better" in many ways.

I don't write shell scripts for nontrivial things and it's rare that I see a good reason to, so I'm not sure that moves the needle much. It's 2019, we have other scripting tools, etc.

Hmm, I see your point, but on the other hand: is that really a good reason to continue the status quo of shell scripting if there are improvements to be made?

Being practical about it: if you install fish you can also install bash, and then running a bash script is as simple as `bash script.sh`, so you can have your cake and eat it too.

Although, in this particular instance, if Apple is going to cease shipping bash at all, I can see why this would be annoying out of the box.

I really like fish and had a pretty good run using it, but I have found myself on zsh for quite a few years - it’s just less friction to go with the herd on this particular part of my toolbox

As MacOS is a certified Unix, like the workstations of days gone by, they should've gone all out enterprise and switched to ksh.

Heck, the new Mac Pro is even priced like a SGI/AIdX box.

Exactly, compatibility. fish has a somewhat different syntax to bash.

as far as i know !! does not work on fish, which means it's dead in the water (had to) as far as i'm concerned.

Discussion on the topic: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/288

And, a omf plugin if you want: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/plugin-bang-bang

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