Re:Fish Shell Design Principles
by justinmayer on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @01:11PM
(#11111846)
As you noted, avoiding arcane magical characters is a primary design goal for Fish. But the alternative you mention — using the cursor keys — is indeed cumbersome and not at all what Fish users would normally do. In my case, I added a "sdl" command (for "sudo last") as a plugin for my Tacklebox and Tackle projects:
https://github.com/justinmayer/tacklebox
https://github.com/justinmayer/tackle/blob/master/plugins/sd...
Some may feel that these kinds of functions should be built-in, and if so, that's probably where the philosophical divide lies. For me and many others, avoiding esoteric syntax makes it easy to compose small snippets that accomplish precisely what we want, without having to remember unintuitive special characters or deal with their often-idiosyncratic behavior. (^_^)
Thanks for sharing, I do like the philosophy that avoiding esoretic syntax and unnecessary configuration, that would prevent anyone from writing clean and solid code.
Not only are special characters useful but some shells went to the other extreme. In the early days of the Mac, the system’s default keybindings made it so easy to type “weird” characters that the MPW Shell had many more special characters than shells on other platforms at the time, leading to creative uses of ƒ and ∂, etc.
Now that Unicode support is becoming more common, perhaps some bold shells will bravely adopt new special characters.
If you really really hate cursor keys there are keybindings you can use instead. Don't remember what they are though because I personally don't mind using the cursor keys. (I do know that they add vim keybindings in the latest version, which was a commonly requested feature)
Yeah the bang commands are the biggest thing I miss. Such an easy powerful feature.
On the other hand I love how much fish does for me. I really take a huge amount for granted and noticably miss it when I have to use a different shell.
I understand the desire to avoid using the special chars but the alternative (using the cursor keys) is just too cumbersome. It turns out that when you use the shell for everything, efficiency is the thing that matters the most.
Not complaining - I'm not the target audience - I just find it an interesting observation about usability.