Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

fish shell VS Spaceship ZSH

Compare fish shell VS Spaceship ZSH and see what are their differences

fish shell logo fish shell

The friendly interactive shell.

Spaceship ZSH logo Spaceship ZSH

Powerful, customizable Zsh prompt, your own spaceship 🚀
  • fish shell Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-23
  • Spaceship ZSH Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20

fish shell features and specs

  • User-Friendly Syntax
    Fish shell features a more readable and user-friendly syntax compared to traditional shells like Bash or Zsh, making it easier for new users to learn and use.
  • Modern Features
    Fish shell includes out-of-the-box support for modern shell features such as syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and smart command-line completions, greatly enhancing the user experience.
  • Web-Based Configuration
    Users can configure Fish shell through a web interface, making it more accessible and easier to customize compared to other shells that require manual configuration file edits.
  • Consistent Scripting
    Fish shell uses a consistent scripting language, which reduces the quirks and peculiarities often found in other shell scripting languages.

Possible disadvantages of fish shell

  • Compatibility Issues
    Fish shell is not POSIX compliant, which means scripts written in Fish will not be compatible with other POSIX-compliant shells like Bash or Zsh, potentially causing issues in environments that rely on such standards.
  • Smaller Ecosystem
    Compared to shells like Bash and Zsh, Fish has a smaller ecosystem of plugins, themes, and community support, which could limit available resources and tools.
  • Learning Curve for Experienced Users
    Experienced users of traditional shells like Bash or Zsh might find Fish's different syntax and features take some time to adapt to, potentially reducing initial productivity.
  • Limited Script Portability
    Scripts written in Fish shell are often not portable to other shell environments without significant modification, reducing their usability in multi-shell setups.

Spaceship ZSH features and specs

  • Customizability
    Spaceship ZSH offers extensive customization options, allowing users to tailor the prompt to their preferences and workflow needs.
  • Feature-Rich
    It includes numerous built-in features such as git status, node version, and other integrations, which enhance productivity for developers.
  • Aesthetically Pleasing
    The prompt is visually appealing with a modern aesthetic that improves the user experience compared to default terminal prompts.
  • Active Development
    Spaceship ZSH is actively maintained, with regular updates and community support, ensuring it remains current with the latest features and bug fixes.
  • Performance
    Optimized for speed, minimizing the performance impact on shell operations compared to some other complex prompts.

Possible disadvantages of Spaceship ZSH

  • Complexity
    The wealth of customization options can be overwhelming for new users, possibly requiring a learning curve to master its full potential.
  • Dependency Management
    There may be additional dependencies or configurations required to fully utilize all features, which can complicate setup for some environments.
  • ZSH-Specific
    As a ZSH-specific prompt, it limits its use to environments where ZSH is available or preferred, potentially excluding users who prefer different shell environments.
  • Configuration Overhead
    Although it offers high customizability, setting up and tweaking the prompt to suit personal preferences can be time-consuming.

fish shell videos

this tank is not overstocked | Fish Tank Review Ep. 1

More videos:

  • Review - Can Female Bettas Live In A Bowl Together? | Fish Tank Review 36
  • Review - Ryan's First Time Catching Fish for Dinner!!!

Spaceship ZSH videos

No Spaceship ZSH videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

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Blockchain
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User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, fish shell seems to be a lot more popular than Spaceship ZSH. While we know about 134 links to fish shell, we've tracked only 12 mentions of Spaceship ZSH. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

fish shell mentions (134)

  • A short tutorial on using fish shell.
    Follow this to install. Note that this tutorial assume that you are on Linux. - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • Tools for 2025
    I've probably been using fish shell [0] for close to 10 years now. When I need POSIX compliance or if I need to run a one-off bash command, I just call bash. It's exceedingly rare. Browsing through the documentation for Oils, it seems to be organized in a way that's very confusing. When you open the fish shell website it was two clear buttons for Tutorial and Documentation. [0] https://fishshell.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • TIL: Ghostty — a new and quite promising terminal emulator
    I remember that Julia Evans, whose blog I follow, mentioned a few time that she uses Fish. Also, some days ago I came across this post about Fish rewrite to Rust from C++, which sounds like a cool thing to do. However, I tried it some time ago, and while pretty neat, I wasn't convinced to switch to it completely. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Easy development environments with Nix and Nix flakes!
    The default shell in the above flake adds Valkey, NodeJS 22, the PNPM package manager, and the fish shell to the environment. It also starts Valkey in the background through a shell hook, passing it a custom config (declared via Nix!) and runs fish so we're dropped in the fish shell instead of our login shell. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • A new shell for using modern Unix commands
    I’m testing a new shell called fish, and I’m enjoying some features that truly make it a friendly interactive shell. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
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Spaceship ZSH mentions (12)

  • Zim – The Zsh configuration framework with blazing speed and modular extensions
    Https://github.com/spaceship-prompt/spaceship-prompt And I've way too many plugins # Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
  • Oh My Zsh and Oh My Posh on Azure Cloud Shell
    Install themes for oh-my-zsh. It's totally up to you which theme you're going to pick, but this post chooses either Spaceship or Powerlevel10k. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Mastering Bash and Terminal
    If you want all this and some more without setting it up yourself, oh-my-zsh spaceship prompt theme is great... I don't feel at home at a terminal without it by now, so one of my first installs after brew ;-) https://github.com/spaceship-prompt/spaceship-prompt. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • Do we need to know the current programing languages version that regularly?
    Afaik it was first widely popularized by Spaceship. Starship is explicitly modeled on Spaceship. Source: over 3 years ago
  • I just made my transition from Windows 11 to Manjaro Gnome! Can someone please recommend me a better looking terminal?
    Gnome terminal is great as it matches system theme. Well according to me the thing that looks out of place is the shell prompt and I would recommend spaceship for zsh. Well even after that if you want a different terminal both kitty and alacritty are great options but kitty you have to theme manually wherein in alacritty you can configure it to match gtk theme. Source: over 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing fish shell and Spaceship ZSH, you can also consider the following products

zsh - The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting.

Oh My Zsh - A delightful community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.

GNU Bourne Again SHell - Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter, that will appear in the GNU operating system.

Starship (Shell Prompt) - Starship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell! Shows the information you need, while staying sleek and minimal. Quick installation available for Bash, Fish, ZSH, Ion, and Powershell.

Codefield - Tools for developers, designers and photographers

the xonsh shell - Xonsh is a Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell language and command prompt.