[1] "Redirect stderr to stdout and pipe doesn't work as expected" https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/110

Here's my fish config if you want to see an example: https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/src/tip/fish/config.fish

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723235
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5567639
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073162

One of my main commandline utilities is git in combination with git-flow(amazing). I found the normal git completion lacking. I believe branches didn't get completed correctly in combination with some commands. The git-flow completion was non existent.

When that changes I might try it again. But for a shell that has tabcompletion as a selling point I was very unimpressed.

However, it seems like Fish is not fully POSIX-compatible, therefore you can face weird problems in Vim plugins, for example.

For people that exploit redirection, file handle rewiring, here docs and such... consider zsh with https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

  set foo this that "the other"

  echo $faux; echo $faux[1]

  echo $foo[4]

Also, writing autocompletes for functions is both far simpler than in bash, but I'm also missing some of tools that bash provides.

https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh?source=cc

A few things I occasionally run into: You can't just paste somebodies setup instructions into your shell anymore (you can temporarily invoke bash for that though). And when writing setup instructions yourself, sh is still pretty much the standard. VirtualEnv generates an activate.fish out of the box - nice! I still occasionally type !grep by accident. And I do miss &&.

  function import_bash_aliases --description 'bash aliases to .fish function files.'
      for a in (cat ~/.bashrc  | grep "^alias")
          set aname (echo $a | grep -Eoe "[a-z0-9]+=" | sed 's/=//')
          set command (echo $a | sed 's/^alias .*=//' \
            | sed 's/^ *\'//' | sed 's/\' *$//' )
          echo "Processing alias $aname as $command"
          if test -f ~/.config/fish/functions/$aname.fish
              echo Function $aname is already defined. Skipping...
          else
              alias $aname $command
              funcsave $aname
          end
      end
  end

A replacement is easy enough though and is in my config here: https://github.com/dmotz/dotfiles/blob/master/functions/sudo...

Beyond a few other syntax incompatibilities, I've enjoyed using it.

Maybe if it was at least somewhat bash or POSIX compatible I would be on board, but the developers don't even seem to want to help us out in that regard.

Here's a presentation I gave to my local coder community on fish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWmKfb2jQhU

Now that's an odd slogan. Is it trying to make the point that the competition is even older? Appeal to old-school hackers? Subtly tell me that the project hasn't been updated in a while?

A few things stand out to me as huge pluses:

- It has a lot of cool functionality out of the box such as highlighting, smarter autocomplete (type in a partial word at the prompt and hit up instead of the cumbersome bash ctrl r/s history prompt that loves to beep at you), directory history (alt left-arrow and alt right-arrow), and more.

- You don't need a 10k .bashrc or 1k .zshrc to unlock most of that cool functionality, it's just enabled by default. So anywhere you have fishshell installed, you get 95% of what you're used to, no need to git clone or scp over your .bashrc.

- Startup time is _very_ quick compared to bash or zsh with said 10k .bashrc or 1k .zshrc, and is comparable to bash or zdh with no startup file.

The only weird error I ever ran into was with an older version of fish shell complaining about missing directories in your PATH every time there was an automatic completion available. I have not run into that issue with newer releases.

It is not sh-compliant, which will occasionally wreck havoc when you have a program that shells out without explicitly using sh. I remember running into this issue specifically with vim and emacs on more than one occasion, but truth-be-told I consider this a bug with those programs rather than a fault with fish.

There's also the matter of it not being installed on some machines, but I've used bash for so many years now that my brain flips back into bash-mode anytime I see that familiar colorless prompt with a dollar sign at the end.

It's not an essential upgrade. I also wouldn't bother using it for shell scripts either. But I'd say give it a boy scout try for interactive usage and see how you like it.

What I do is spawn fish at the end of my .zshrc that way I can just exit if I run into something that doesn't work with fish.

The biggest plus for me is that the default auto complete in fish is twice as smart as the other ones.