Hi Isaac - and others who would like to support a Bash feature request, 

> Very good idea! Many more regular Bash users will probably be 
> interested in these Fish features. I will write up a draft this 
> for an email that we may send to the Bash devs. I will first 
> drop it here to collect comments from you and other Fish users.

Here is a draft for an email to the Bash developers: 

"""To: [email protected], Chet Ramey 
Subject: Two Bash feature requests (based on Fish). 

Dear Bash developers, 

We are long-time users of Bash. A few years ago we encountered an alternative 
Linux shell called Fish. For us this shell has two compelling features that we 
would love to avail of in Bash: 

1)Fish features "on the fly COLORING and UNDERLINING".

a."On the fly COLORING": If you type the name of a binary - or a command - you 
can immediately see if that binary - or command - exists, because if it exists 
it would be shown in green on the command-line. If the binary does not exist it 
will be shown in red, so that you know that the binary/command is not 
available. This may indicate to you that you made a typo. 

b."On the fly UNDERLINING": If you start typing the name of a file - or a 
command - you can immediately see if the pattern you typed so far coincides 
with an actual file - or command - on your system. If a file matching the 
pattern exists, it will be underlined. If a file matching the pattern does not 
exist, what you type will not be underlined. 

2)Fish's standard history search behaves a bit like the 
"history-search-forward" and "history-search-backward" functions from the 
readline library. However readline's "history-search-forward" and 
"history-search-backward" from the "beginning a command" only. Fish's standard 
history search matches substrings as opposed to "left substrings" matched by 
history-search-forward" and "history-search-backward". We know that readline's 
"reverse-search-history" and "forward-search-history" functions achieve more or 
less the same effect, but we feel much more comfortable with the way Fish 
performs a standard history search. 

The main reason why we do not want to keep using Fish is that Fish provides its 
own scripting language,  which is incompatible with Bash syntax. So we would be 
very happy if the requested features could be implemented in Bash. We also 
think that these two features may be useful to many other Bash users. 
Therefore, we would like to ask how difficult it is to implement them in Bash, 
and if the Bash developers would be interested in putting them on Bash's wish 
list. 

Best wishes, 

Guido van Steen and Isaac Dupree"""

I was thinking of constructing a small [Debian] virtual machine [VMware/Qemu 
image], with Fish installed as the main shell, so that the Bash developers can 
get an easier understanding of our feature request. 

Please send me your comments and indicate to me if you want to sign/support the 
feature request. 

Best wishes,

Guido


      

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