Back to ZSH

Posted on September 3, 2020

As I mentioned in a previous post, I started using fish after using zsh for about 15 years. After working exclusively on fish for about 3 months, I am now back to zsh.

In the end, there was nothing inherently missing in fish, but fish just did a few minor things differently which began to get annoying.

Fish’s tab-completion first shows a short list of option (top 10 or so) and you have to press tab twice to see the whole list. I found that I was almost always pressing tab twice.
By default, while doing tab complete on directories, fish includes the directories in my CDPATH. In principle, this is a good thing, but these directories are shown before the directories in the current working directory. Combined with the previous comment, this meant that I had to hunt around for the directory I wanted to cd to.
The trick of ignoring certain suffixes using fd that I had listed in my previous post was not robust enough. I could get something like nvim ~/.config/<tab> to work reliably. So, after a couple of weeks, I just commented out the fd stuff and then I had to hunt for the right file extension while doing tab completion.
I kinda missed sudo !!, etc. The Alt + Arrow commands were simply not as powerful.

So, in the end, although fish has an overall cleaner design, my muscle memory is too much tied to zsh. So, back to the old …

This entry was posted in Terminal and tagged zsh, fist.