Fish - The friendly interactive shell

A User-Friendly Shell

Introduction

A great deal of effort has been spent in the last decade trying to make computers more user friendly. While much progress has been made on making graphical user interfaces more user friendly, much less has happened with non-graphical programs such as shells. This is unfortunate, since there are still many things that are inherently easier to do using a shell. The concept of commands, pipelines and environment variables are somewhat complex, but I believe modern shells are harder to use than they have to be, both for the beginner and for the seasoned shell hacker. I have written a new shell called fish, or the friendly interactive shell, that tries to solve several issues that I have found with other shells.

fish features syntax highlighting, advanced tab completion features, discoverable help, a revised shell syntax and many other features. In this article, I will describe some of the features found in fish, and explain why I think they are useful.

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