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tptacek

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

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fish was written by an Apple engineer.

And? So are lots of other things.

Well maintained by a former Apple engineer

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

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.

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