fish

I started using Linux in the 90s, and it was my everyday OS for a while, maybe a decade. Since then I've mostly used Windows, with Linux VMs. And given the general disposability of VMs, I've stopped caring about the intricacies of my setup, and have mostly taken the defaults. At home I mostly use a VM for cross-compilation testing, and use Fedora, and GNOME. When I was younger, I used WindowMaker, BlackBox, and other "clean"-looking WMs. Apart from a brief dalliance with zsh, and tcsh, I always just fell back on my default, which was bash (except at my last job, on AIX, where the default was ksh, but that, and IBM, really feel like relics of the last century).

Probably the same for some other Linux users. Some people are hyper-customizers, but not me. Not anymore. I look for something good enough, and go with that. I'm not interested in things taking up a lot of brain-space unless they're something I particularly care about. And bash is everywhere, so...

My younger co-workers are obsessed with productivity, not in a rise-n'-grind, let's-get-this-bread techbro kind of way, but in more of a "if I can use something that makes me more productive, why wouldn't I?" One of my colleagues uses kakoune on the command line, though she's alone in that (most of the others use a visual editor, typically VS Code, while I use a hybrid of that and vim depending on what I'm editing). But one thing that a lot of them use is fish, instead of bash.

I gave it a try and was immediately hooked. The autocompletion is more featureful than bash, and I hear it comes with a reasonable scripting language, but I don't particularly care: from my perspective, if I'm writing a short script, I'll use sh. But the autocompletion is great. On tilde.club, it remembers that I'm usually cd-ing to my 2025 gemlog dir, so I log in, cd, right arrow, done.

I can't think of the last time a tool really hit me like, yeah, I need to use this. I'm in my 40s, now. I didn't think I'd have an opinion on shells, like it was 1997 again. Figured I'd just use bash and vi forever. Well, I guess I was half right.