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Idea #113: More user friendly shell

bug This idea was marked as implemented the 25 September 11. Available starting Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.
Written by Corey the 28 Feb 08 at 17:54. Category: System. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: Implemented
Rationale
While ubuntu gets more user friendly for new users with every release, there are still a lot of times when users must open up a terminal to get a bit of work done. Istalling some packages if they use a loki installer for ex. Or doing some low level configuration to get that one piece of obscure hardware working. Why not make the shell experience more user friendly for people when they must use it. I'm talking better syntax highlighting so you know if you spelt a command or filename wrong. More complete tab completion for filenames and command line options. These are all features of Fish, the friendly interactive shell. I don't do shell scripting, but when I do need to use the CLI, fish makes thw experience much more painless.

Update : See excellent propositions from idea 10809
Tags: (none)

-61
votes
implemented
Selected solution (#1): Auto-generated solution of idea #113
Written by Corey the 28 Feb 08 at 17:54.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #113 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!

Attachments
spec Blueprint fish-shell: Ubuntu
forum Ubuntuforums.org thread #459311


Duplicates


Comments
will_in_wi wrote on the 28 Feb 08 at 20:22
I have never heard of fish. That is pretty sweet. I would suggest that ubuntu use fish by default and make the user config tool a little more painless.

afita wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 00:11
fish is a great user-friendly shell. It would be very nice to make it the default in Ubuntu. I use bash all the time and I generally think it's great, but fish is so much nicer and "humane". bash has such an arcane and esoteric syntax.

stomfi wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 05:27
Its actually pretty easy to use a RAD tool like runrev to create a GUI interface to the shell. See this article:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/14751.html

Endolith wrote on the 18 Mar 08 at 23:03
This has NEGATIVE 35 votes?? What's wrong with people? Fish should be the default shell if Ubuntu is meant to be usable by regular people.

Sukarn wrote on the 28 Mar 08 at 17:19
I don't understand why people voted this down.

Is it incompatible with bash? But then again, dash breaks a lot of bash scripts and dash is the default. This shell is the best shell I have seen for newbies.

Granted, hotwire is a graphical shell, but there are some things that you need to type commands for, and fish makes that a lot easier.

I guess people just vote by looking at the title of the brainstorm idea.

Endolith wrote on the 25 Jun 08 at 04:20
People who want to use bash are smart enough to enter the one line to default to it. It could also just be an option.

We really need to use fish as the default. People who want a "hacker OS" have plenty of other distros to choose from.

durand wrote on the 22 Aug 08 at 20:56
I really don't know why its so negative. I've just switched to this and its really impressive. Just need to change the colours for a black background...

Endolith wrote on the 1 Oct 08 at 12:10
People vote things like this down because they want to make Linux as hard as possible to use. They won't be the "command line el33t" if everyone can do it.

kennydude wrote on the 27 Dec 08 at 20:46
This is a very bad idea to do because, the terminal/shell is meant for *administrators* or people who know what they are doing. That is why there is GUI

dorins wrote on the 4 Jul 09 at 19:56
Fish is pretty great. Why is this downvoted?

cheesehead (Brainstorm admin) wrote on the 25 Sep 11 at 15:58
Fish has been in the Ubuntu repositories since at least 8.04


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