That’s decades of legacy for you…

I bet each step/arrow/decision had a good reason at some point, but most of them probably back when computers lived in caves and hunted their tapes using spears and rocks.

I feel like we’re slowly reaching a point where the complexity is collapsing in on itself - just look at the absolute chaos a modern web app is.

Agreed! It’s cathartic to see it laid out so terrifying. Now I feel less bad for never understanding it.

Select the color which matches the steps before filenames ((non-)login and (non-)interactive), then follow that arrow the rest of the way. There’s more colors in Bash because Bash makes a distinction between remote and local shells.

Another way to look at the same data for Zsh (note: $ZDOTDIR will be used instead of $HOME if it’s defined at any step along the way):

One confusion on the Bash side of the diagram is that you see branching paths into ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bash_login. Bash will use for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and execute only the first one that exists and is readable.

A lot of systems will call various inits from others to give you a more simplified flow. (Closer to what zsh does.) Check out some of those files in /etc/ it is calling as well as ~/.bash_profile. Or, you might not even be in a login shell!

All of the repos for my GitHub sourced vim plugins live under one parent directory. I symlink to them from ~/.vim

One example is a simple function that pushes the top level repo directory onto my dir stack and then runs a loop where it pushes each subdir into the stack, runs “ggpull” then pops back to the top level repo directory. ggpull is an alias added by the zsh git plugin. After all repos have been updated it pops back to my original pwd.

I run this as part of my “update all the things” script but sometimes I also want to run it in demand from the cli. So I want this function in all scopes and I want it to have access to “ggpull” in all of those scopes.

zshenv’s selling point isn’t necessarily that your typical functions are available across scripts (though that can be neat, too – I source aliasrc as well as an utils script file in my shell config) – it’s that it’s there for non-interactive shells too, whereas zprofile is only applied for login shells (and zshrc only for interactive ones).

So for example, I could open a command in my editor of choice (Helix’s :sh for me), and if I define stuff using the zshenv, all of my aliases etc. are right there. I just have to avoid naming conflicts for script function names if it’s the default shell, but that’s pretty easily done.

Not really, you can make .fish scripts or call “bash script.sh” when it’s more appropriate to be posix compliant

Not really. I hate writing bash scripts anyway so I usually script whatever I need in Ruby which is far better at scripting than any posix script ever will be, and even when I do need to run a bash script I still can or just shell down into bash or zsh if I really really need to. But that’s like once a year.

The only thing I miss in fish is $?

I know $status exists but my fingers don’t.

Zsh has more features and customization options than bash. Fish has a ton of convenience features at the cost of POSIX compatibility (which many view as a good thing)

Once upon a time I was the person that was constantly messing with my shell. I would performance tune it, try out new plugins weekly, change my config often. It honestly became a huge waste of time. Since switching to fish I literally haven’t spent any time configuring it at all, besides adding in the fzf plugin and the fzf-marks plugin. It just works. And it has all of the same features that everyone adds to zsh with plugins straight out of the box.

If you’re happy with the default in bash or zsh then you will be even more happy with the default in fish, as it’s just much much more user friendly (which is why so many people add so many plugins to bash and zsh: to make it more user friendly). You can even configure it (even the colors) with a web interface! No mucking about in text files if you don’t want to.

I was the person who used every kind of zsh package manager that existed. I even had performance tweaks for some because they were too slow for me. I didn’t even use oh my zsh because it was too slow, and I had hundreds of customizations and maybe 30 plugins.

I no longer needed any of the plugins except fzf and fzf-marks when I switched to fish. It really did simplify my life a whole lot. I don’t ever mess with configs anymore.

That’s fair. But look at it this way, when you’re at work you’re being paid for it, and you might eventually improve your productivity.

Also, you can have a look at oh my fish, it’s an alternative to omz I used before switching to starship.

Presumably just to get rid of unnecessary stuff that would slow down the start of all bash instances. Also aliases that could fuck with scripts

We all know what tarot were gettin

Yeah, I may have a larger $PATH than required.