poll: which shell do you use for interactive use? (not scripting) you can pick more than one

(no need to reply with specifics if you're in 'other', I'm mostly interested in the rough division between bash/zsh/fish)

@b0rk Being in “other” is a surprisingly troublesome impediment to installing, configuring, and even using many pieces of software. So much these days just assumes a shell with bash-ish syntax, or outright supports only bash and maybe zsh.

I remember the days when only the plain Bourne shell was assumed by scripts, and software dared not make any assumptions about interactive shell use. The “bad-old days” in many ways, but some grace for non-bash/zsh/fish users today would be appreciated.

@b0rk I would love to use zsh more for accepting, but shellcheck is only for bash and not having that is like running with scissors through a field of scissors with your friend, Scissors.

Shell syntax is a persistence hunter that makes us look tame. It WILL catch you without suitable weaponry.

@groxx yeah I use bash for scripting for the same reason

@b0rk no options for "sh", "csh", "tcsh" ... not everyone is stuck on Linux -- and bash is just the PHP of the systems-eng world.

@winterschon pretty confused about the hostility here, you can only put 4 options in a poll so i put the 3 most popular shells

@b0rk @winterschon Is fish really more popular than the bourne, korn and c-shell variants? I have yet to log on a machine that has it

@oook @winterschon i mean according to the poll it is, among people who answered that specific poll

it’s hard for me to imagine anyone installing fish as a machine’s default shell though, my guess is that people mostly use it on their personal machines

@siracusa I'm really curious about this — my usual solution to "these instructions only support bash" is just “start bash, run the instructions, then exit bash” and I'm interested in hearing about cases where that solution doesn't work

@siracusa @b0rk wait what do you use?

@dmitry tcsh

@b0rk That works for doing a thing one time, but sometimes the software wants to set stuff up in your shell config to make it work (e.g., one of the virtual environment tools for a programming language that modifies the shell search path and sets a bunch of env vars, etc.)

To use that software, you have to alway remember to first start bash (or whatever), then stay in bash while you use it. It’s basically forcing you not to use your preferred shell!

@b0rk Some “helpful” software also automates the modification of what it hopes are the for files for your shell. So I’ll be running tcsh and some setup/install script will modify my .bashrc, which has no effect on my shell.

What stops you migrating out of curiosity? I’ve personally not found migrating shells too painful?
@siracusa

@alfier 1. Inertia. 2. The principle of the matter!

@b0rk Usually, it's not too hard to figure out what the software tried to set up in bash (or whatever) and then translate that stuff to your preferred shell's syntax and dot files. Usually. But it's still one more annoying thing to deal with.

@siracusa ah yeah I know exactly what you mean thanks! I run into the same thing a lot with fish, though fish support has become more common over time

I am so glad to keep my configuration files under source control - seeing the random crap that’s been “helpfully” added in my colleague’s environments drives me up the wall.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@siracusa/112724256052731385

@alpha Here I am laughing in nushell. It's Not Even Posix™!!

@alpha This is why I believe all config languages should support a `require conf.d` sort of operation. The same thing happens when you try to have chef/puppet/etc modify different sections of a config file. Workarounds often involve magic cookies, in comments, with horrible grep/sed/awk detectors.
/etc/profile.d, bash-completion, etc are so much less terrible.