Fish Shell vs Zsh (Z shell)

Overview

Zsh (Z shell)

Stacks293

Followers208

Votes0

GitHub Stars4.0K

Forks475

Fish Shell

Stacks86

Followers100

Votes0

GitHub Stars31.4K

Forks2.2K

Fish Shell vs Zsh (Z shell): What are the differences?

Introduction

Fish Shell and Zsh are both popular Unix shells that provide an enhanced command-line interface. While they share many similarities, there are some key differences between the two. In this article, we will outline six major differences between Fish Shell and Zsh.

Syntax and Autocompletion: Fish Shell has a simpler and more intuitive syntax compared to Zsh. It provides a visual autocomplete feature that displays suggestions as you type, making it easier to write commands. On the other hand, Zsh has a more complex syntax and offers customizable autocompletion options, allowing users to fine-tune their shell according to their specific needs.
Default Configuration: Fish Shell comes with a minimalistic and beginner-friendly default configuration. It aims to be more user-friendly out of the box with features like color highlighting and improved error messages. In contrast, Zsh has a more comprehensive default configuration and offers advanced functionality, such as path expansion and command history manipulation, making it more suitable for power users.
Plugin Ecosystem: Zsh has a vast and well-established plugin ecosystem, including popular frameworks like Oh-My-Zsh. This allows users to easily extend and customize their shell environment with various plugins and themes. Fish Shell, while also having a plugin ecosystem, is relatively smaller and less mature compared to Zsh.
Scripting Language: Fish Shell uses its own scripting language, which is more straightforward and easier to learn for beginners. It aims to provide a more consistent and user-friendly scripting experience. On the other hand, Zsh is compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) syntax and supports a wide range of scripting languages, making it more suitable for advanced scripting tasks.
Compatibility: Zsh is designed to be more backward compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) and the Korn shell (ksh). This means that shell scripts written for the Bourne or Korn shells are more likely to work seamlessly in Zsh without requiring any modifications. Fish Shell, being a more modern and alternative shell, may require some adaptation of existing shell scripts for compatibility.
Licensing: Fish Shell is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which ensures its continued availability and allows for modifications and redistribution. On the other hand, Zsh is released under a permissive license (zsh license), which also allows modifications and redistribution but without the strong copyleft requirements of the GPL.

In summary, Fish Shell provides a simpler syntax, beginner-friendly defaults, and a user-friendly scripting language but has a smaller plugin ecosystem and may require more adaptation for compatibility. Zsh offers a more customizable and feature-rich experience with a wider range of plugins and better backward compatibility with existing shell scripts.

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Detailed Comparison

Zsh (Z shell)	Fish Shell
An interactive login shell, command interpreter and scripting language.	It is a useful utility filled shell which makes command line operations quicker with customized functions, easy to append path variable command, command history and more right out of the box.
Programmable command-line completion; Sharing of command history among all running shells; Improved variable/array handling; Editing of multi-line commands in a single buffer; Spelling correction; Various compatibility modes, e.g. Zsh can pretend to be a Bourne shell when run as /bin/sh; Themeable prompts; Loadable modules/plugins	Autosuggestions; Scripting;VGA Color; Web Based configuration
Statistics
GitHub Stars 4.0K	GitHub Stars 31.4K
GitHub Forks 475	GitHub Forks 2.2K
Stacks 293	Stacks 86
Followers 208	Followers 100
Votes 0	Votes 0
Integrations
macOS Hyper Terminal Linux iTerm2 Windows Terminal Oh My ZSH GNU Bash	Linux macOS FreeBSD Windows OpenBSD

What are some alternatives to Zsh (Z shell), Fish Shell?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Related Comparisons

Fish Shell vs Zsh (Z shell): What are the differences?

Introduction

Syntax and Autocompletion: Fish Shell has a simpler and more intuitive syntax compared to Zsh. It provides a visual autocomplete feature that displays suggestions as you type, making it easier to write commands. On the other hand, Zsh has a more complex syntax and offers customizable autocompletion options, allowing users to fine-tune their shell according to their specific needs.
Default Configuration: Fish Shell comes with a minimalistic and beginner-friendly default configuration. It aims to be more user-friendly out of the box with features like color highlighting and improved error messages. In contrast, Zsh has a more comprehensive default configuration and offers advanced functionality, such as path expansion and command history manipulation, making it more suitable for power users.
Plugin Ecosystem: Zsh has a vast and well-established plugin ecosystem, including popular frameworks like Oh-My-Zsh. This allows users to easily extend and customize their shell environment with various plugins and themes. Fish Shell, while also having a plugin ecosystem, is relatively smaller and less mature compared to Zsh.
Scripting Language: Fish Shell uses its own scripting language, which is more straightforward and easier to learn for beginners. It aims to provide a more consistent and user-friendly scripting experience. On the other hand, Zsh is compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) syntax and supports a wide range of scripting languages, making it more suitable for advanced scripting tasks.
Compatibility: Zsh is designed to be more backward compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) and the Korn shell (ksh). This means that shell scripts written for the Bourne or Korn shells are more likely to work seamlessly in Zsh without requiring any modifications. Fish Shell, being a more modern and alternative shell, may require some adaptation of existing shell scripts for compatibility.
Licensing: Fish Shell is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which ensures its continued availability and allows for modifications and redistribution. On the other hand, Zsh is released under a permissive license (zsh license), which also allows modifications and redistribution but without the strong copyleft requirements of the GPL.

Fish Shell vs Zsh (Z shell)

Overview