steel_for_humansWhat are some programs/tools/packages that you can't live without?
fish - Ever since I’ve made the switch to Linux, the terminal has been part of the experience. And, honestly, I wouldn’t want it any other way. Besides its efficiency, I also very much enjoy how it automatically keeps track of everything I do within. I don’t get that functionality whenever I do something within a GUI. But bash left a lot to be desired in that regard; its history simply didn’t record everything. It was also pretty bare-bones; no syntax highlighting, no auto suggestions etc. Thus, after trying to bend bash (and later zsh) to my will and ultimately being dissatisfied with the janky mess I was left with, I finally gave in to at least give fish a honest try. The rest is history. Heck, fish is the very first thing I install on a machine.
I saw fish recommended for new users in openSUSE’s documentation. I want to try that. There is a way to switch to Bash for a particular script, right? I know that file-based scripts have the shebang line, so that’s a non-issue, but what if I have a Bash command I copied from the Internet and my default shell is fish?
As I suppose the other user already went over your main query, I’ll instead focus on what might have felt rather innocuous.
my default shell is fish
I subscribe to the school of thought that one should not change their default shell^[I suppose it could be fine~ish as long as it’s POSIX compliant AND compatible with bash. Which, unfortunately, fish happens to be neither of the two.] through invoking chsh (or whatever other method that applies changes to /etc/passwd). This article does an excellent job at laying down the reasoning (and the recommended alternative). FWIW, the alternative’s day-to-day experience provides all of the pros without any of the cons.
Don’t change your login shell, use a modern terminal emulator
chsh is a small tool that lets you change the default shell for your current user. In order to let any user change their own shell, which is set in /etc/passwd, it needs privileges and is generally setuid root. I am of the opinion that setuid/setgid binaries are a UNIX legacy that should be deprecated. I will explain the security reasons behind that statement in a future post. In this “UNIX legacy” series of posts, I am looking at classic setuid binaries and try to find better, safer alternatives for common use cases. In this post, we will look at alternatives to changing your login shell.