One upside of installing GhostBSD is that I have been introduced to the fish shell. Fish is an alternative to the bash shell. It turns out it is quite nice! I suppose I could have found this sooner, but I have never gone looking for a new shell, because bash is, well, so ubiquitous that such explorations seemed unnecessary. I did use the Korn shell for a while because I think it was the default on sdf at the time (not sure if it still is), but I mostly found it annoying that it was not bash.

Fish is a different experience. It is aimed at being a pleasing interactive shell, with nice autocomplete and overall good DX. Bash is better for scripting, mostly because of portability. But fish is just pleasant. I concede that I may sometimes want to paste code into my fish shell that I intend to run in bash, but I have got around this by creating a little function in my fish.config:

function b
bash -c "$argv"
end

This allows me to prefix a line with “b”, and it will run the rest of the line as a bash command. Overall I am pleased with these improvements. I challenge you to spend 1 hour in the fish shell and see how you like it.