this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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This may be the wrong place to ask, but what am I missing about shells? Other than executing commands, what do you do with them?
I think the best way to get an idea is to look at feature lists for fancy shells like zsh or fish. But in short there are a number of things a good shell can do to help to execute commands faster and more easily. Stuff like autocompletions which make you faster, and also make things more discoverable; fuzzy searching/matching; navigating command history; syntax highlighting which helps to spot errors, and helps to understand the syntax of the command you're writing.
I use fish mainly just for the quality of life increase that its predictive features and command history give. I also really like that it uses functions to play the role of aliases, and it's super easy to write and save new functions on the fly.
That said... I haven't put in the time to really learn its nuances and I still write shell scripts using bash. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but it works for me.