> Fish is cool! I keep wanting to use it, but the inertia of Bourne shell is hard to overcome.

Back when I tried Fish some like 5 or 6 years ago I think, I was really attracted by how you could write multiline commands in a single prompt. I left it, though, when I found out that its pipes were not true pipes. The second command in a pipeline did not run until the first finished, and that sucked and made it useless when the first command was never meant to finish on its own or when it should've been the second command to determine when the first should finish.

It seems they've fixed that, but now I found that you can also write multiline commands in a single prompt in zsh, and I can even use j/k to move between the lines, and have implemented tab to indent the current line to the same indentation as the previous line in the same prompt. Also, zsh has many features that make code significantly more succinct, making it quicker to write. This seems to go right against the design principle of fish of being a shell with a simpler syntax, so now I don't see the point of even trying to move to it.

I feel that more succinct and quicker to write does not mean simpler.

Fish tries to have a cleaner syntax and probably succeeds in doing so. It may even be an attempt to bring some change to the status quo that is the POSIX shell syntax.

I didn't try to fish anyway, because I like to not have to think about translating when following some tutorial or procedure on the Web. Zsh just works for that, except in a few very specific situations (for a long time, you could not just copy paste lines from SSH warnings to remove known hosts, but this has been fixed recently by adding quotes).

> I feel that more succinct and quicker to write does not mean simpler.

Indeed, it does not. They're design trade-offs of each other.

> Fish tries to have a cleaner syntax and probably succeeds in doing so. It may even be an attempt to bring some change to the status quo that is the POSIX shell syntax.

Indeed, it does, and it is (attempting to, though maybe not doing).

The thing is that, for shell languages, which are intended to be used more interactively for one-off things than for large scripting, I think being more succinct and quicker to write are more valuable qualities than being simpler.

If you are interested, I use a configuration for zsh that I see as "a shell with features like fish and a syntax like bash"

In .zshrc:

    ZSH="$HOME/.oh-my-zsh"

    if [ ! -d "$ZSH" ]; then
        git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.git "$ZSH"
    fi

    DEFAULT_USER=jraph

    plugins=(zsh-autosuggestions) # add zsh-syntax-highlighting if not provided by the system

    source "$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/oh-my-zsh.sh"

    PROMPT="%B%{%F{green}%}[%*] %{%F{red}%}%n@%{%F{blue}%}%m%b %{%F{yellow}%}%~ %f%(!.#.$) "
    RPROMPT="[%{%F{yellow}%}%?%f]"

    EDITOR=nano

    if [ -f /usr/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh ]; then
        source /usr/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh # Debian
    elif [ -f /usr/share/zsh/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh ]; then
        source /usr/share/zsh/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh # Arch
    fi

Relevant packages to install: git zsh zsh-syntax-highlighting

Then:

    zsh

WARNING: it downloads and executes Oh My Zsh automatically using git. You may want to review it before.

If it suits you:

    chsh

Works on macOS, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Termux and probably in most places anyway.

You may need this too:

    export TERM="xterm-256color"

For posterity (I actually needed to install this today):

You need to install zsh-autosuggestions by installing the package from your distribution (Debian, Arch) and source it, or just run:

    git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

in zsh and do exec zsh.