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fish shell VS Oh My Zsh

Compare fish shell VS Oh My Zsh and see what are their differences

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fish shell logo fish shell

The friendly interactive shell.

Oh My Zsh logo Oh My Zsh

A delightful community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.
  • fish shell Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-23
  • Oh My Zsh Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-19

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.

Oh My Zsh features and specs

  • Plugin Ecosystem
    Oh My Zsh offers a wide variety of plugins that extend the functionality of your shell, including git integration, syntax highlighting, and auto-suggestions.
  • Themes
    It provides a rich collection of themes that allow you to customize the look and feel of your terminal, making it visually appealing and easier to use.
  • Community Support
    With a large, active community, users can find a wealth of resources, tutorials, and support for troubleshooting and expanding their Zsh configuration.
  • Ease of Use
    Oh My Zsh simplifies the management of Zsh configurations through a straightforward installation process and easy-to-use commands for adding and removing plugins and themes.
  • Highly Configurable
    Even though it simplifies many aspects of Zsh, Oh My Zsh still allows for deep customization tailored to individual workflow needs.

Possible disadvantages of Oh My Zsh

  • Performance Overheads
    Using Oh My Zsh can slow down shell startup time, especially if many plugins or a complex theme are enabled.
  • Over-reliance on Plugins
    Users may become dependent on Oh My Zsh's extensive plugin system, which could discourage them from learning and understanding native Zsh scripting.
  • Potential for Conflicts
    Adding multiple plugins and custom scripts can lead to conflicts and bugs, making the shell environment unstable or unpredictable.
  • Large Install Size
    The framework with all its plugins and themes can take up a significant amount of disk space, which may be a consideration for users with limited storage.
  • Updates and Maintenance
    Regular updates are necessary to keep the system secure and up-to-date, which can be a hassle for users who prefer a 'set it and forget it' approach.

fish shell videos

+ Add

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!!!

Oh My Zsh videos

+ Add

You Really Don't Need Oh My Zsh And Here's Why (Rant)

More videos:

  • Review - Working with Linux - Terminal, Zsh & Oh My Zsh
  • Review - Uninstall Oh My ZSH Right Now And Do This Instead

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to fish shell and Oh My Zsh)

fish shell

Oh My Zsh

Cryptocurrencies
82 82%
Cryptocurrencies
18% 18
Developer Tools
39 39%
Developer Tools
61% 61
Blockchain
100 100%
Blockchain
0% 0
Programming
29 29%
Programming
71% 71

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare fish shell and Oh My Zsh

fish shell Reviews

We have no reviews of fish shell yet.
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Oh My Zsh Reviews

  1. Stan
    · Founder at SaaSHub ·
    Indispensable

    This has become an indispensable tool for me. One of the first thing to install on a new computer.

    🏁 Competitors: GNU Bourne Again SHell, fish shell

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, fish shell should be more popular than Oh My Zsh. It has been mentiond 134 times since March 2021. 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 / 24 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 / 4 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 / 4 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
View more

Oh My Zsh mentions (74)

  • Installing Terraform
    To start this re-learning journey, I feel like I should start with setting up a VPC on my AWS account. I already have an account so I will not be writing about that. However, since I want to do all of this via IaC, I need to setup Terraform. Luckily for me, this is a new laptop so I have nothing setup on it, besides iTerm2. Btw, I am using https://ohmyz.sh/ for my shell, so shout out to that team. This is what... - Source: dev.to / 30 days ago
  • Bash vs. Zsh: Key differences and when to use each
    Oh My Zsh is an open-source Zsh framework used to add extra functionalities for Zsh, turbocharging the entire Zsh user experience. Oh My Zsh’s extra advanced features cause users who frequently use the terminal to gravitate towards Zsh. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Switching from tmux to Zellij
    That's it! Happy CLI mastery with Zellij, Oh My zsh and Alacritty! - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • The easiest way to set up and configure your AWS CLI
    If you are using Oh My ZSH as your shell of choice, you can add plugins=(... Aws ) to your .zshrc / profile and besides having autocomplete for the AWS CLI you will also immediately see in the terminal window what is the current AWS profile you are logged in. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • My Terminal Setup for 2025 🚀
    ZSH and Oh My ZSH offer superpowers to your terminal thanks to its customization and wide variety of plugins. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing fish shell and Oh My 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.

Prezto - Prezto is the configuration framework for Zsh; it enriches the command line interface environment...

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.

iTerm2 - A terminal emulator for macOS that does amazing things.

PowerShell Plus - Learn how to learn and master PowerShell fast with an interactive learning center, a powerful IDE, pre-loaded scripts, and a PowerShell Editor… all for free.

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