[email protected] wrote:
> 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: 

yup.  Provide a link to fishshell.org ?

> 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. 

ah, those things are worth it and possibly maybe simpler than full 
syntax hilighting.  Also Fish hilights the name of special words such as 
'if' and 'for' as though they were commands.  (For extra sophistication, 
it could use different colors for builtin; function; executable-file on 
PATH; etc.; but that might be too much craziness.)

(Bash has an option for advanced tab-completion too, which means it must 
know something useful about its own syntax, but for all we know it might 
be too slow for hilighting purposes.)

> 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. 

I admit that I do not understand the history searching very well. I 
never figured out how to use Bash history except the up and down arrow 
keys, and Fish history only through the (often troublesome) feature of 
pressing up or down arrow when there is some text on the line that 
you've written/modified.  It's quite possible that if I did research and 
put into my command prompt (made up), "C-a: search back; C-b: search 
front; C-e: ..." so that I could remember them whenever I needed them, 
then I could be happy with Bash's history features?  Tell me about why 
Bash's issues.

Also, is bug-grub a mailing-list, so that we should subscribe or ask to 
be cc'ed on responses?

-Isaac


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