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Completion in Zsh alone made it worthwhile for me. The completion scripts for Zsh are worlds more powerful and complete than anything I've found for Bash.

And, there's even a script that offers Fish-like syntax coloring for Zsh: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting/

But not having used Fish yet myself, I can't really offer any reasons to use Zsh over Fish.



I've been using fish exclusively for about 2 years, and the only thing I really missed was smart tab-completing multiple directories, like cd l/a/t/b<tab> completing to Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles even if there's another top-level directory starting with L.

Fish's consistent syntax for conditionals/loops is what brought me over in the first place, I always needed to work to remember what goes where in zsh/bash. For one-off tasks the reduction in mental overhead was a _huge_ win.

That said, I recently did switch back to zsh for a functional command-not-found handler - fish's only includes the name of the binary rather than the whole command, so I couldn't productively use it as a retry wrapper.


>I can't really offer any reasons to use Zsh over Fish.

Bash script compatibility, bigger userbase and therefore more third party customizations.


Definitely this. I switched to Fish for a while and was very happy, but the lack of Bash compatibility got a very old after a while. You never think about how much out there assumes you have a sh/bash-compatible shell running, and watching ordinary tasks fail hard because of an incompatible shell gets very, very frustrating.




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