I've always done it as: `> file`

That's actually very nice, I never thought about that one.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work in fish:

> fish: Expected a command, but instead found a redirection

Right but I don't think anyone is really concerned if it runs in fish. Fish is non standard and doesn't try to adhere to bash. If we want to write fish shell scripts we can do that elsewhere

Funny how the same sentence applies to bash wrt POSIX shell in other contexts

Or after thinking about it for a moment, true > file. Or by its shorter name, :> file.

`printf > file`, but there's endless ways of achieving the same thing (and that's part of the beauty).

Trick: You can use just

    >file