FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

I've now had a hobby for ten years. Unlike other people, it's not woodworking or drawing.
I'm a special kind of nerd and so I work on nerd software: The Fish shell.
Today is the ten year anniversary of my first pull request being merged.

This isn't even the kind of software that you can explain to most people. I don't think my wife ever really got what I was doing.
(she saw a cute ascii art fish in pride flag colors on my computer and liked it)

But it's a special kind of nerd software. Others focus on performance, or on being able to do the absolute maximum number of things, giving you the most knobs to fiddle with.
We try to make it nice (some call this "user experience", but tbh that always sounds so full of itself).

In working on that for a decade, I've learned a bunch of things. I've learned programming languages - my first contributions were all to the scripts and documentation,
but I picked up C++ and now I'm learning Rust. I'm still a pretty mediocre programmer, but I manage to add useful things.

I've also learned things about how free/open source software works. Contributors come and go. Often people will announce they're doing a thing and then just... not.
This is fine and normal - these are people announcing their intention to do something in their free time, and sometimes it just doesn't work out for a whole host of reasons.

I've learned that sometimes people are jerks. Sometimes they're entitled, sometimes they feel hostility towards a project they don't use and nobody is asking them to use.
(my suspicion here is that a bunch of this is caused by the same sort of thinking that makes a contingent of Dark Souls fans jerks - the "git gud" folks, who've mastered one thing and therefore anyone who didn't is a "scrub")

I've learned that design work is hard, especially when you're something open-ended like fish, which can't just point to a standard and go "that's what we're doing".

I've learned that interactive responsiveness is hugely important in making things feel fast. It turns out people don't really care about script execution speed,
what they want is to type a thing and then it reacts to what you typed. We often hear people say that fish is "snappy", and when you try to benchmark script speed it really really isn't. But since a lot of fish's features are implemented as slow plugins in other shells, it feels much nicer in fish.

I learned that terminfo is useless in our current reality and wrote 3500 words on it. I learned a lot of other cursed unix knowledge (you never want to know about process groups or terminal modes).

Some of the bigger things I've done, in no particular order:

• I've rewritten the documentation theme. No small feat for someone with the artistic sense of a sloth
• I wrote the "fish for bash users" document
• I've added the math and path builtins
• I've made it self-installable, and I'm in the process of making it work as a single file you can move wherever
• I've made it beat both bash and zsh in some glob benchmarks (this is the only case we're faster in pure script speed)
• I added a CLI version of the fish_config theme and prompt pickers
• I eliminated an entire FAQ by making bind work in config.fish
• I made the test suite diff the expected and received output - which featured the most cursed python I've ever written
• I made the homepage hotpink
• I helped with a lot of transitions: the documentation switched to sphinx from doxygen, the build system to cmake, the CI to Github Actions from Travis, we swapped the test suite to a new system, migrated the logging to a new system, ported the entire thing to rust
• I enabled mercurial prompt support by default - which required writing shellscript to figure out if something is a potential hg repo, because hg is pretty slow to start
• I invented the "config snippets" mechanism so you can split your config up into separate files, and external tools have a place to drop-in config.

I'm proud of these things and also of fish's reception. I like when fish appears on stage at a conference. I enjoy when people I've heard of use it (I know for a fact at least one fish user has been on TV!). It is preinstalled on Steam Deck, apparently.

Also a few of my friends have started using it, and I never told anyone to. I don't, as a rule, "recommend" it. It would feel weird to me to do that. I guess that means I'm bad at marketing? Anyway, some of them use it, and so far none of them have told me it's terrible, so I'm counting that as a win.

Overall, Fish has been pretty successful. The statistics we do have come from voluntary package manager statistics, and range from roughly 2% of Debian systems to 20% of Archlinux systems. It's fairly safe to say it is the most popular "alternative", non-POSIX shell. In the last ten years it has roughly tripled in install share on Arch, and quadrupled on Debian.

And this success has had some cool effects! Because not only do tools like python ship fish integration (for venv), but also once they do that, they start figuring out that shells don't all have to be bash-compatible. So it becomes easier for other shells to be added as well. It helps lift us out of the POSIX-or-bust hole that we dug ourselves into for like twenty years there.

I haven't made a single cent from this. Which is fair, I never asked for money and haven't given people any way to give it to me either.
I suspect if I tried and asked for money, I would get about $10 a month. Maybe a bit more, but certainly not nearly enough to make it a feasible job.
Which would also change the entire dynamic, and so I'm fine with that not being the case.

💭what if we had crackers and cheese and progesterone, and we were both girls