[Haifux] [hackers-il] My "Stop Using (and Teaching) C-Shell and Tcsh" Page

[Shlomi Fish]

On Friday 19 October 2007, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> On 10/6/07, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
> > We discussed the C-shell in these mailing lists before. A few days ago I
> > decided to set up the definitive anti-C-shell page, based on an email I
> > wrote, so I did:
> >
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/csh/
>
> Good page.  Definitely s/tcsh/bash/g is even more obvious than s/cvs/svn/g
> ;-)
>
> But for those of us that find even {ba,z,k}sh unsatisfactory, I highly
> recommend trying the Friendly Interactive SHell
> <http://fishshell.org/>.  It fixes many things like quoting, innovates
> in configuration and has interactive syntax-higlighted
> multiline-editing completing-on-steroids prompt.

My problem with FISH is that its syntax is incompatible with that of the 
Bourne Shell, much less with bash. As such, I recommend people not to get use 
it, for fear it will become the next csh/tcsh. I'd rather improve bash or zsh 
in areas that one feels they need improvement, than create something 
incompatible.

So stay away.

And I daresay I don't find bash unsatisfactory. I'm probably still using a 
very small of its functionality, and it has many dark corners that I haven't 
investigated yet. I still haven't even found enough motivation to use zsh 
instead of bash.

And I'm still finding myself using Perl for many non-trivial scripting 
problems.

>
> I do have to warn that it is still evolving, not perfectly stable, and
> has performance problems.  So you might not want it as your login
> shell yet, but it's definitely worth checking out.
>

I'd rather see the good FISH ideas integrated into bash.

> See http://fishshell.org/wiki/moin.cgi/BashToFish for some highlights
> and a quick start.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

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