Fish: A better alternative to Bash in Linux?

Fish: A better alternative to Bash in Linux?

Bash is a fantastic tool in Linux, but there’s room for improvement in everything. Fish is an alternative shell for Linux that some might consider to be a significant upgrade to what Bash has to offer.

Derrik Diener reports for Make Tech Easier:

Have you ever wanted to get away from Bash when using Linux? It’s understandable. Though Bash is often praised as being a great shell, it has a lot of shortcomings. Enter Fish shell. It’s a great alternative with tons of neat features. The most notable being predictive type. Other handy features include syntax highlighting, searchable command history and auto suggestions.

Fish is very user friendly. Just start typing. It’ll guess. Want to type in the pacman command? Chances are it’ll fill it out for you. All you’ve got to do is hit the right arrow on your keyboard and let it auto-complete. This feature is very powerful. It doesn’t just work with system commands (like packagers) but with any command or terminal program available. If it’s installed on your system in some way, Fish will find it and let you know about it.

Fish really doesn’t need that much configuration. From the start everything should be set up exactly the way you need. There is, however, one small tweak that can make your Fish experience that much better: Disabling the startup message. Though helpful, it can get pretty annoying to see every single time you open a new terminal window.

While Bash is a good shell, Fish is better. It makes up for a lot of the shortcomings Bash and other shells have. The auto-complete function is a lifesaver, and the robust configuration options are a welcome addition. The shell is very fast and light on it’s feet. Sure, there are other alternatives, and maybe even some that boast equivalent features, but where Fish wins is its simplicity. It’s easy to set up, easy to configure and easy to get stuff done.

More at Make Tech Easier

The article about Fish replacing Bash caught the attention of Linux redditors, and they weren’t shy about sharing their opinions about it:

Formegadriverscustom: “Bash might have shortcomings, but lack of autocompletion is not one of them. Really, none of these fancy, newfangled shells with all their bells and whistles really convinces me. If I ever move away from Bash, it’ll be to something simpler, like mksh :)”

Johnny0055: “I like how fish can automatically make completions by reading man pages, so it can often generate completions for programs that have no specified completions. I myself use fish mostly because it has better defaults, and a simpler scripting language.”

3dank5maymay: “As for scripting languages, bash really sucks. But regardless of what shell you use as an interactive shell, you can write your scripts in any language, so bashs poor scripting syntax isn’t really relevant for my choice of an interactive shell.”

Cutol: “Have you tried Fish? Ive never been able to get Bash’s autocomplete to be anywhere near as nice. I love how Fish remembers recent completions and suggests yhose first, instead of cycling through choices in order. “

Nomto: “Some ways in which fish’s completion is superior to bash’s:

If you start auto-completing in the middle of a word, it will intelligently complete to the actual word. The last matching command is shown grayed-out as you type, and you can easily select it. The pager is pretty nice.

Also one advantage of fish is that it’s not set in stone, so if you have a sensible feature request you can submit it. Recently there was a very useful builtin “string” that got in.”

Kamiru: “Fish is actually simpler than bash. For one it doesn’t have many buildins. Another example is how doesn’t have aliases, all aliases are just functions.”

Rodents: “Fish has way superior completion to Bash, the problem is that a lot of small utilities only come with Bash, not Fish completion.”

Sthuck: “Fish is incredibly nice, but the lack of support of for POSIX sh kills any chance I would use it at my day to day job.”

UGMadness: “I consider myself a novice when it comes to Unix-like OSes, but Fish has definitely made the experience much more fun and convenient for me since I started using it. The intelligent autocompletion and ease of configuration is a godsend. It made me start loving the command line, something I would’ve never tohught it would be possible before.”

Oldsquidy: “I used fish for a while but moved to ZSH after a network outage which forced me to use a TTY, fish decided that it could run one command but then die. Never went back after that.”

More at Reddit

Softpedia reviews KShutdown

Customizing the shutdown procedure of a Linux computer is probably not high on the priority list for many Linux users. But it is quite possible to do so with tools like KShutdown. Softpedia has a full review of KShutdown that can help get you started.

Silviu Stahie reports for Softpedia:

KShutdown is an application that allows users to customize the shutdown procedure for Linux and Windows OS, with features like time delay or proper notifications.

The Windows OS has a ton of these applications, but there aren’t too many for Linux users. The main difference is that Linux users can do pretty much anything they want from the terminal, but that’s not always fun, especially if you are new to this OS. Having a proper application that can automate the shutdown system is indeed useful.

Applications that run both on Windows and Linux are not all that uncommon, and it’s usually possible as long as they both use Qt. Some of you will say that you can find some GTK+ apps out there, but that’s not really the point. Qt apps are more easily adopted for both platforms. As the name suggests, this was built for KDE. The developers went the extra miles and made sure that it can run on pretty much anything that is still maintained.

I tested KShutdown in Ubuntu 15.10, and it worked just fine, even if there is no official Ubuntu 15.10 package. I downloaded the .deb file for Ubuntu 15.04, and it worked without a hitch, but there is a caveat. The application itself weighs only 162 Kb, but it has a ton of dependencies.

More at Softpedia

The differences between AMOLED and LCD displays in Android smartphones explained

AMOLED and LCD displays are used in many Android smartphones. But which is better and why? Android Authority has a helpful overview that explains the differences between AMOLED and LCD displays.

Rob Triggs reports for Android Authority:

Mobile display technology is firmly split into two camps, the AMOLED and LCD crowds. Both are based on quite different underlying technologies, leading manufacturers to tout a number of different benefits depending on which display type they’ve opted for.

There are some pros and cons to both technologies and some reasonable user preferences between the different color and contrast profiles. Although the prevalence of multiple display modes available in modern smartphones makes this somewhat less of an issue these days. However, the falling production costs and additional benefits of OLED displays makes them likely to be the technology to watch going forwards, with cheaper LCD units filling the gap in budget segments of the market.

Major display manufacturers, such as LG Display, are betting big on OLED technology for the future, making major investments into additional production facilities. The AMOLED panel market is expected to be worth close to $30 billion in 2022, more than double its value today. Not to mention the as yet untapped market potential in flexible displays.

That said, developments in Quantum Dot LCD displays could narrow the performance gap between LCD and OLED, so certainly don’t count LCD out of the race just yet.

More at Android Authority

Did you miss a roundup? Check the Eye On Open home page to get caught up with the latest news about open source and Linux.