painfully ironic

Oh nooo, the paAaAaiN.

🫩

im using my freedom not to make my food taste weird

News flash buddy, taste is subjective.

Use olive oil for whatever you like. Don’t use it for whatever you like.

I’ll use it for what I like. I like to fry my onions and garlic with olive oil. 👌💪

Peace! ✌️

Beast arms though, dang

This is such an American take. I use olive oil to fry onions regardless of what nationality the food is lol. It’s just onions. I can grow this up north in Scandinavia. Even indoors.

I’m just making “food”. Our influences are so close to us we don’t really put a “country” on our food. We mix and match and experiment with different food cultures, np. Don’t need to stick to “Italian” for one dish. You can use influences from wherever.

We don’t really say “let’s make a Japanese wok.” It’s just a wok. And it can have any ingredients you like. Chicken, salmon, beef, roots, greens, whatever.

Be free with your cooking for the love of food. ❤️👨‍🍳

Where da olive oil at bro

😆👌 I know right

I miss her from before all the implants and shit. She is a product of enshittification.

orphan crushing machine

That is a great term, holy crap. I had to look it up.

Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like “he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine” and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you’d need to pay to prevent it from being used.

Okay cool, I think I’m starting to understand a bit better now. 😄✨

I do find that using [] or [[]] is cleaner looking than using the standard test command

If I may blow your mind (really hoping you don’t already know this, otherwise it will be long, boring repetition, but here goes 😅):

[ is actually just an alias for the test command, for which the closing ] is a required last argument (in fish it’s required; in bash it’s even optional!).

In the documentation for both fish and bash, it really just starts with if list;, where list is a list of commands. This means we can do stuff like:

if wget ...
then
  # download successful
fi

And that’s why we can do this in bash too:

if test ...
then
  ...
fi

And even (in bash only; not fish):

if [ $foo = 1 # no ending `]`
then
  ...
fi

Further cementing that if can be seen as just a command that runs another command (its argument(s)), then controls the flow.

I think this knowledge helps me feel more comfortable with the fish syntax, to have always in my mind that these can be considered “commands”, more than they are “syntax”. Sort of. Even if they are syntax to a certain degree of course.

Does that all makes sense? 😅💫

But anyway, I see and acknowledge all your points you’ve made throughout, even though I ignored them and focused only on those things I didn’t understand for the sake of profession. So I validate your feelings regarding those as well. Like, if you aren’t feeling comfortable with fish from the start, it won’t be easy since the community is smaller. For me, almost everything I needed was in the documentation, but sometimes people learn best by surfing around community information. Fish also isn’t exactly portable, indeed. Etc, etc. All these points you made, all good and valid. 👌

You know what, I think fish is probably the kind of shell with which you sort of “fall in love”. It might not be a “try it for a month and see” thing, but more of a “hey I’m curious about this, let me check it out… Oh wow, I really like the opinionated design philosophy here, I will probably use this a long time, so let me install it” kind of deal. It’s for a specific kind of mindset I guess. Which I’m sure more people would realize that they actually have if they only knew about fish, but it’s still not for everyone, clearly. 🙂

So while it does enable a more condensed scripting language, objectively, it might not be subjectively more legible if it’s hard to break free from the habit of bash and POSIX like syntax, which is very understandable.

To wrap up, I thank you very much for going on this journey with me. I hope it was half as interesting for you as it was for me. I learned some things for sure. 😊 So thanks for your patience and replies! 🙏

Is the main issue that you are using test and extra indentation with fish? Like, does this help?

function foo
  if [ "$foo" == 1 ]
    echo "found"
  else
    echo "not found"
  end
end

Otherwise I don’t understand the difference except for the lack of curlies for the function. Bash also has a function keyword which can be optional. function is like a command with an argument (and options). It doesn’t need a symbol or anything signifying that the code will start, other than a new line, just like other shell statements/command invocations. if is the same way. It’s just a command that runs the rest of the command arguments and inspects the return code. Same as using the more idiomatic and and or commands, which are pretty neat to use sometimes.

test $foo = 1
and echo "found"
or echo "not found"

I digress. Otherwise it’s just {'s, and thens and dos. That’s the only difference.

If you are writing such big blocks of code that you can’t tell which end belongs to which opening thing, there is probably some abstraction needed. Extraction into a separate function. 😬 Maybe that’s what you mean?

I prefer not having to analyze where statements, conditionals and functions begin and end.

I’m very curious why you feel like you have to do that with fish and I never did. Like there must be something fundamental. What separates the two of us here. Because I don’t even know python. I can read python, but I never did anything in it. Like ever. So that’s not a factor. In fact I’m mostly used to C-like languages where everything that opens a block uses a {. So why do I not have an issue with fish and just find it much simpler.

Maybe you are thinking about fish more as a programming language? Whereas I’m thinking about it more like a series of commands (I guess more like a “purer” scripting language of sorts)?

I dunno, this is getting very philosophical. 😆

There’s nuance in every conflict, nobody sane goes on the attack without reason. That’s what I believe.

the flow in general. It’s ugly and not transparent when compared to bash or any other language

Could you give a single example of this “ugly” and not “transparent” control flow, so I can compare it to bash? I’m having a hard time relating to those subjective and fuzzy adjectives. To me, fish is more clear by a mile. And that is the opinion of someone who has been scripting proficiently in bash for almost two decades, and in fish for like two years. So I’m super curious what you mean, specifically.

Is this possibly a question of bias? You are used to bash-like syntax and weren’t really open to, excited about, or even neutral to fish to begin with? Could that have been a factor?

how it chooses to start and end, there is no punctuation, it seems to emulate a tab oriented language

I don’t get this. Everything that starts a block of statements or control flow is a statement in itself, like function, or if. You can do the next statement on the next line, or add punctuation (;) and add the next statement on the same line. Just like bash.

What’s weird, I always thought, was that bash had these weird, required, extra statements that are needed, like then, and do, etc. Those are ugly to me, and make no sense when you think about it for a little bit. They are excessive and unneeded. The first keyword indicates the start of the thing, by itself. Really simple, and a good design choice IMO. Fewer LOC, less verbosity, without being too terse and sacrificing legibility but only increasing it.

Piping and redirecting are badly implemented

it wouldn’t function unless I used a pager which wasn’t needed in Bash

Super curious about this scenario. Piping isn’t different in fish. You just pipe output to an input. So yeah, very curious about this specific case.

I dislike heavily how flow control works on it

You mean its if and switch statements? For and while loops? Just like bash and zsh has?

the lack of indication where it starts to where it ends

You mean the end keyword? The start of things should be clear enough. Keywords are used for them depending on what you’re starting. I like the fact that everything ends with the same keyword. Much simpler.

the function layout, not to mention attempting to pipe anything via it

Piping something “via the function layout”? I’m not even sure what that means. I’d love to know more if you would.

maintaining compatibility with other programs and scripts when using it, just made it not worth it

This should be fully transparent. It’s a shell. I switched all my scripts to fish, and my integration with my desktop environment was completely unchanged. It’s just text in and text out.

I have better things to do with my free time th[a]n to try and fight a shell every step of the way to make it look cleaner.

I mean… It took me like an hour to read through the documentation, and all the syntax is so small you can memorize the entire language.

It comes with a nice web based documentation built in. And all the built-in commands have their own man page for easy reading, compared to the jumbled mess of zsh’s docs. I could never find a goddamn thing in zsh’s two handfuls of different man pages. Nothing was where I thought it would be.

It kind of sounds like you were fighting fish rather than it fighting you, every step of the way. That sounds absolutely crazy compared to my experience.

My experience with fish is that I finally understood what my shell was doing and how it works, compared to zsh. I even understood what bash was doing. zsh, no. And all these files it was leaving around my home directory.

What I will concede is that you should not convert your shell scripts if you need portability. If your scripts will be on multiple computers, fish is a bad idea if you don’t control them all.

Otherwise it feels like some other issue is bigger here, because fish is so much simpler. Coming from me who’s been scripting in bash and zsh for about 20 years, and zsh is the only one that has stumped me, and whose documentation I’ve been struggling with. Even bash’s is better. 💀

It doesn’t surprise me in the least bit, considering how complex everything seems to be in zsh.

Years ago, I was trying to understand how the completion system works. I never understood.

Even the user-facing shit you need to put in your .zshrc in order to enable completion in the first place does not look like it’s made for a human to read. Not to mention that you need to enable it in the first place.

Configuring zsh was such a mess for me, for years. I don’t know why I used it for so long. Glad I gave fish a shot.

I’m 38, I’m not a kid.

But I do have a fever right now.

True, multipurpose.

“shell scripting (various languages)”

🤷‍♂️😅

That sucks.

Scripting in fish is so much better than bash, holy. Reduced my scripts’ LOC by probably 50% and made them actually legible when coming back to them 6 months later. I converted all my personal scripts from bash to fish.

What makes it “obnoxious”??

Converting my scripts from bash to fish has definitely been worth the time.

Scripting in fish is so much better than bash, holy. Reduced my scripts’ LOC by probably 50% and made them actually legible when coming back to them 6 months later. I converted all my personal scripts from bash to fish.