Bash vs ZSH vs Fish: What's the Difference? 

Appreciate keeping it objective. I was actually looking for "what to know if you're switching from bash to zsh" and every video that popped up was a sales pitch or dunking on bash.

I just use fish as my interactive shell because of how comfortable it is to work with, and then use bash for anything else, including scripting. This seems to be a very common setup and it works really well.

Very well laid out - thanks! Especially liked the parts about the posix compliance as it really helps me make up my mind about what shell to use going forwards.

Eric, this is one of the most complete explanations on the subject, that I've ever seen. You didn't assume that the viewer knew a darn thing about programming and configuring and you concisely cover it so that anyone could understand. Great job!!!

This was awesome! Thanks for the detailed explanations in between, this video really covered all the essentials.

Nice! Thanks Mr. Murphy, for your time and efforts to make this video.

Thank you for the straightforward video. Really helped me out to someone who is pretty new to using unix shells.

Great explanation of these shells. One thing many don't understand is it's not necessary to use one kind of shell for everything. For writing simple scripts, I would use Bash or /bin/sh to be (mostly) POSIX compliant. This skill once learned, can be used on any Linux or Unix system with very little deviation. For more complicated scripts I'd use Python, Ruby or Perl, etc. This is true even if my interactive shell of choice was zsh or fish, etc. One exception is it seems Macs now define zsh as the default shell. Even so, for scripting I'd probably use /bin/sh unless there was some feature I really needed from zsh. To put it another way, I probably wouldn't ever write scripts in zsh or fish unless it was for configuring the interactive use of that shell. For interactive use, use whatever shell makes you the most productive. If this is your own machine or account that you have complete control over, go ahead and change the default shell but if you have to share an account with others on a server, then leave the default shell and run exec zsh or exec fish after logging in. This is also how you can try different shells without changing the default one. I've been using zsh off and on for 30 years and even when I first started using it back then, it was head and shoulders above the ksh shell which was the only other shell that made sense for interactive use on the systems I maintained. I've never used fish but did checkout the docs and it looks nice for interactive use.

It's funny that even thou scripts usually start with #!/bin/sh, they may not work with bourne shell (default on BSD) or dash (which is supposed to be smaller and faster), because they wrongly assume that /bin/sh is symlink to bash. And bash is POSIX compatible (it can run sh scripts), but it also adds some simplified, extended syntax, which is not.

Smart comparisons! Thanks for the video.

Thanks for video. I'd been searching that difference between them recently. 😄

Fish is very nice, and I would have switched to Fish a long time ago, but it would have meant losing hundreds of aliases and functions that I had created over the years for Zsh, so it wasn't worth it. I can't imagine why the Fish creator(s) decided to use such a different syntax. It definitely creates a problem for adoption.

Thanks man, you have helped me today. I will stick with Zsh for now. 😊

Ok, so here's a comment for the great info from the channel. I tried out Fish from using a basic terminal and I: - like the features included and not having to do the config myself from scratch (wow, autocomplete is kinda nice), - hate the fact it's not POSIX compliant (sorry, I like using code from the internet for basic tasks without having to do the conversions, since most of the stuff you'll find won't be for fish specifically). ZSH 4 humans then, probs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think, in fish, if you add #!/bin/bash to the config, everything after that line may run with bash/POSIX syntax. I haven't actually tried it, I don't use fish, but if you're tinkering it's worth a shot to see if it works. Also, don't quote me on this, but I don't think zsh is fully POSIX, but they don't break very far away from it so most POSIX stuff should still work. If something doesn't work in zsh, I think there's a specific call you can make to put it in a POSIX compliant mode, though I forget what. The second part might also just be me misremembering a fish feature as a zsh feature, it's been a hot minute since I found my comfort zone between the three shells so the details are blurring together. As a last note on my comment, I toyed around with editing my PS1/Prompt line in ZSH when I was figuring out my setup, I came up with this line and have come to really like it, whomever reads this, feel free to steal it for yourself and drop it in your own .zshrc PROMPT='%F{green}[%F{red}%2~%F{green}]%F{white} 🠶%F{reset_color} ' That line comes out looking like "[~] 🠶", of course with some fancy colors. And for almost fully fish-like integration, you can download the appropriate plugins to match this plugins line plugins=(zsh-autosuggestions zsh-history-substring-search zsh-syntax-highlighting) That's pretty much everything I do for my own zsh, outside of some aliases and exports.

Yesssss, thats what i was looking for. hanks for helping

Great content and explanation. I subbed :)

Informative video. Thanks!

Really great for this noob wondering how to get set up to start Dev study. Thank you!

what do you think about powershell? is worth to learn over bash/zsh ?

My login shell is dash and my interactive shell is fish. I find that dash works well with all the stuff my system needs to do and fish works well with me.

Thanks for this useful video!

Your content is amazing, Eric. Please make a video on different state management libraries (Context API, Redux, MobX, Recoil etc...) and which one is better suited in which scenario? Thanks

Personally I like zsh because I kinda feel like it's the best of both worlds if you're willing to set it up. It also help if you need to work with bash since you need to learn way less differences. I also don't like having two shells bc I feel like it kinda a waste of disk space. But that's a personal opinion and tbh the fish\bash combo might actually be more beginner friendly now that I think about it

Fish understands that the traits that make for a good interactive shell are completely different from the traits that make a good programming language (or scripting language). It's right in the acronym: *Friendly Interactive* SHell. Unlike bash which tries to be both a good scripting language _and_ a good interactive shell, fish focuses entirely on being a great interactive shell, and its scripting capabilities and really just for configuring said shell rather than anything else.

Thank you very much i seen this video just in time!

Zsh FTW ;) srsly tho - great video explaining the diferences without any bias towards or against any of them - I've been on Zsh for over a decade now and started out with oh-my-zsh as many do to get all the goodies at once - but it became kinda bloated - so I learned to set up my own config and never been happier - I've tried using fish several times but it's so frekin confusing - think I'm just too comfortable with what I'm using ;) Anyhow - well presented video

It's worth noting fish doesn't exist to be a replacement for Bash scripting but t it was designed aa the usee shell. Look at what it offere interactively like out-of-box autocompletion or sophisticated search history, and how it sacrifices on POSIX compatibility. One more advantage of fish is that it's not inherently tied to Linux or Unix and works the same way regardless OS, which I think is an advantage.

One good thing AI brought us is the ability to easily translate a fish script to bash (and vice-versa). For simple scripts it will do a good job.

If you only got time to learn one shell the learn bash. You’ll find it pretty much everywhere.

Personally I use zsh in my terminal, but if I write any scripts it'll be bash. Not sure if this is a stupid reason if the same results can be achieved with a bash shell, but I use zsh because I get features like tab auto completion that allows me to cycle through several results and select the one I want, git status info when entering a git controlled directory and so on.

since fish makes some scripts break i use bash as my default shell, but i invoke fish at the end of my .bashrc if it detects that it is in interactive mode

1:47 Could you tell me what projects there are for bash which add auto-suggest and syntax highlighting?

I could not find your zshrc can you please share it?

Hell yeah that's what I was looking for.

I like the fish had, throwing away the baggage of posix, to a create more friendly shell and scripting language, but they didn't overcome the portability problem. I instead write most scripts as a single file python script, since a Python 3 interpreter is present in almost every modern Linux system.

Just curious, which font is that? Pretty neat

Great video!

I was more curious about the difference in scripting, like which one is fastest, some useful features and so on, but I guess there's some video about that too, somewhere.

Anyone knows what terminal font that is?

YO THANK YOU SO MUCH

i just use zsh, oh my zsh makes it very easy to add plugins to your configuration. I can't imagine my life without them.

Great vid

Thanks.

Honestly, ease of modification isn't even a factor in my decision. I don't tend to modify things on the fly. Installing something to get bash tweaked is no more a hassle than installing a plug-in for zsh. I'm more interested in the things that might make a difference in daily operations.

Can I actually use this on a MAC and so changing the behaviour and output?

great video, but also.... drinking game: every time "right here" is said

I didn't even know about the variable stuff. Lol I was just using my terminal for updating, CDing into folders and normal things. Also writing neofetch to the end of .bashrc for the neofetch command on start up. Wow, Interesting

Is there a way to implement some of BASH's little conveniences, like echo ${var[^^|,,|~~]} into ZSH, instead of having to resort to echo "$var" | tr ['[a-z]' '[A-Z]'|'[A-Z]' '[a-z]'|'[A-Za-z]' '[a-zA-Z]'] every time I want to change case?

So the shell is a TUI that runs CLIs and TUIs inside it?

Fish is best simple and easy to use + you can customize it too with oh my fish.

Arr there a fish2bash and bash2fish conversion scripts?

now i get it. thanks

Muy bien amigo. Estoy con bash

Lol fish developers just went and reinvented the wheel. It would be understandable if their approach was more convenient than that in bash it would make sense, but it is less convenient - instead of typing just equals sign you must use the whole command

Con el zsh no hay la documentación en mi idioma. Es solo inglés

I've only just found your channel and am, like others, really enjoying your interesting and well presented content. But (and meant as a kind criticism intended to be helpful) do you think you could perhaps try to avoid saying everything two or three times? You have a tendency to explain something, and then explain it again using slightly different words. I think we got it the first time :)

I do the same as Psoewish........ works well for me too... ;-)

たしか、ZSHって、MacOS標準のだよね。僕はバッシュが好きだ。FF12のバッシュに憧れるから

I only know bash. Everything is new for me.

Thanks for clearing out the difference between zsh/bash and fish! Fish sucks imo... Raise traditional bash!

Thanks for the Videos Eric, looking forward to porting my 409 lines of bash to zsh as soon as I'm done with Xmonad lol. I liked the LF video you made. What is the purpose of tags? Is it just a convenient file to have in ~/.local/share/lf/tags to run commands against from lfrc? I would have to make a command to :tag foo, and takes me too foo...I looked at the docs but they don't say much about it: Tag a file with '*' or a single width character given in the argument. You can define a new tag clearing command by combining 'tag' with 'tag-toggle' (i.e. 'cmd tag-clear :tag; tag-toggle').

Nushell!

I actually like fish as a scripting language. I think the POSIX standard is odd and makes it easy to write bugs (like if you don't know when to quote variables, or when a process will run in a subshell) and fish fixes these issues by doing saner things by default and removing confusing features (like word-splitting and subshells). I'd love to see fish pre-installed alongside bash in the future so that fish scripts can be considered more portable than they currently are. But something like `sudo apt install fish` is easy to run in the meantime. I can't be the only one who can't stand typing `"${arr[@]}"` to get all elements of an array, and the "fi" and "esac" and "done" keywords which all do the same thing but have to be used in different contexts. Might as well have added "rof" and "elihw" to be consistent. The standard is just messy and irksome.

Fish is just awesome inuse it since i discovered it

At 9:34 you said bash but the shebang is /bin/sh

in kali 2022 version zsh is the default .

Kali Linux have zsh as a default shell 🐧

I use fish + starship, yeah i'm lazy 🤣

你会写脚本吗？

tcsh or GTFO. JK, I’m a grumpy old hacker who moves seamlessly between tcsh, bash.zsh, and the occasional ksh.

life and death

zsh is just superior. Unarguable.

i only learn dont use fish it suck. did not hear any sweet short cuts. why use fish or zsh. bash works? and its allready new from ash= lol

To be honest, I tend to stick with BASH, because a few hundred machines and a few devs/admins. Buuut honestly, using the command line is just arcane crap at this point. Yes it's often faster, and definitely required for some things, but it's nonsense from 50 years ago.

Yawn!!! I hoped for the actual differences, not the availability