Zed Shaw and I regularly break into each other's computers and copy configurations from each other (At least, that's how I ensure our obscure choices stay synchronized).
On a serious note though, he and I have near identical tastes in
'good software' so his suggestion to try out the
fish shell was spot on.
Yeah, folks have tried to pimp
zsh on me and I gave it five minutes without falling in love (granted I didn't try hard at all), but fish was different. In fish, I typed help and it fired up a page in Firefox with some pretty dang comprehensive documentation.
Here are a random smattering of favorite features so far :
- Syntax coloring. Red means bad command, green means good
- Tab completion that actually works. ssh sa[tab]@ru[tab] is all I need to fire up a session to rubyreports.org
- Tab completion that really rocks. rm -R[tab] gives me a contextual listing of all the extra flags I could be using and what they're used for. Screw searching manpages!
- No more typing cd, just type and tab complete directories as needed
- No need for ~/, it always knows your home dir's layout.
- Search history by typing part of a command, and hit the up arrow. It'll highly the part of the command you typed.
- nice clean config file syntax
Zed also reminded me that
ArchLinux Duke is out, after a quick
sudo pacman -Syu, I'm happily rocking with an improved system, especially liking the more sensible pacman output, and seemingly better mirror handling.
Get on with the new shell hotness. Bash is so 1987.
