Dear Bash developers,
We are long-time users of Bash. A few years ago we encountered an alternative
Linux shell called Fish (www.fisshell.org). For us this shell has some
compelling features that we would love to avail of in Bash:
1."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. Fish also colors
syntactic constructs on the fly. The same applies to mismatched parentheses and
quotes.
2."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.
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, Isaac Dupree and Benny Cherniavsky
P.S. Installing Fish under Debian/Ubuntu just takes "sudo apt-get install
fish". It is also available for Fedora through "yum install fish". For those
interested in a VMware image with Fish installed, we can upload an Debian image
to you of about 100MB with Fish installed as the main shell.
