zero downsides and all upsides? like, zsh with plugins is just fish out of the box. I used zsh for a long long time (and several other shells), but with the plugins you want to have you immediately hit long loading times to actually start your shell. and then when it's finally loaded it's still a worse experience than fish.

As a ux/ui nerd for me its mostly that its a very thoughtful user experience. I have been more or less good at the terminal at different points in time, but if you don't spend much time there its easy to forget every command and how to do things. And ultimately, I don't really enjoy using it as an interface. Its a blank void with little to nothing in the way of affordances-- remember the magic words and you can do anything. But the fact its only used by technical folks means often no one cares to add affordances or ease of use even when it might be possible, and when they do its from a power user perspective.

Fish feels like a much more thoughtful execution of how to interact with a command line interface, and doesnt require a ton of time spent in a terminal to achieve that better ux. Though I still want to set up a nice prompt that improves legibility and make things a bit easier still, I just haven't played with starship enough yet.

There are more things I'd wish for in a perfect world, but for me fish is a very nice step in the right direction :)

it's zsh without having to add in all the plugins. on my NixOS systems zsh+plugins caused it to run slow. Fish just doesn't have that issue as everything is baked into it. setting up functions is also a breeze and the built in themes are great. just one install and no need to configure much if anything.

I suppose it's pretty easy to see why when you consider what the most^[I could be wrong, but searching for "zsh" on GitHub and sorting it by most stars should be a pretty good metric.] popular plugins are for the popular shell zsh:

• zsh-autosuggestions
• zsh-syntax-highlighting

Both of which literally start by referencing fish in their respective READMEs.

And where zsh requires plugins to get these, fish has these by default. Perhaps unsurprising as fish stands for Friendly Interactive SHell. As such, the niceties don't stop there.

Basically, if you want a no-nonsense shell that gets pretty much out of your way and comes with excellent defaults right of the gate, then you simply can't go wrong with fish.

Take this from someone that stubbornly tried to bend bash to my will with stuff like ble.sh (link) and later zsh with zsh-quickstart-kit, but to no avail... It always caused more trouble than it was worth. And when I finally gave in and tried fish, it was pure bliss from the get-go. The rest has been history... Fish has literally become the first thing I install on all my systems.

Note, however, that (as per fish' documentation) you shouldn't change your login shell to fish. This blogpost by a CoreOS engineer goes over it in more length.

It's just a very nice shell that's conceptually very close to common shells like bash and others while it has a nicer syntax than those. All in all very reasonable and rather evolutionary than revolutionary. So the learning curve is rather flat compared to shells like nu or elvish

For me is it's awesome, out of the box, syntax highlighting, auto-suggestions/auto-complete and the up arrow history function (that includes substrings).

Completions, plugins, and themes built in. It's fine. I still use bash for scripting but fish for interactive terminals is nice with little effort.