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I have never heard of anyone using aliases for anything but trivial one-liners. I don't think people consider them as an alternative to scripts so I don't really get the point of half of this post.
However, the part explaining the benefits of using scripts over aliases even for trivial one-liners is pretty neat.
Honestly, I'd rather record command and flags instead of relying on aliases to do that for me.
Unless if its something very "niche" (like automatically pulling the required third party software everytime the distro boots up on .bash_profile).
I like fish abbreviations. They are like aliases but expand when you press space or enter. That way you can edit it, and also still see the full command so you are less likely to forget it when you don't have your aliases. Of course I have some scripts as well.
And: Fish implements aliases as scripts! When you use alias —save, fish creates as script with a function in it.
I use ZSH with plugins but back when I switched away from bash, I also looked at fish. I didn't use it back then because people say it doesn't follow the POSIX standard but is that really an issue? It probably only extends it instead of taking things away, right?
All POSIX compatible shells have their quirks and differences because the common POSIX part is rather small, so you will need to learn them anyway when switching from one to another. Fish is not that different from them (to much less extent than something like nushell) and it benefits from having less ancient baggage.
I still write most scripts for bash, but for interactive use fish is just so much better out of the box.
this is my sticking point with fish. I still need to know bash for writing portable scripts, so its hard to justify scripting in fish.
that's actually a really good argument for not using either.
Taking a step back discussing shells seems like a never ending hell loop.
Sometimes the only way to win is not to play the game.
Use python and stop being stuck in the distant past.
Unless you have a particular reason for sticking to POSIX, who cares? I'll take the user experience improvement without worry.
No issues except that if you want to source files to set env vars you might have to use a plugin (foreignenv in my case)
I still write scripts in bash. But fish's command completion is incredible. Idk, maybe other shells can be that good as well, but fish does out of the box.
Edit: Also some people used to bash wondered what that nice shell is on a server we administrate together. They had no problems using it coming from bash.
And sticking with POSIX is good if you want to stay portable, but my shell mustn't be portable. It should be friendly and reduce mental load.
Just recently I learned that one can also define functions in .bash_aliases. Very handy.
Yep. And if you edit it you can reload it with ". ~/.bash_aliases" and if you do it frequently you can create an alias for it.
Functions are best for this.
It still limits where / how you use them.
For example, it's easier / more efficient to call a shell script from sway (or whichever other software that might be running without a bash login session behind) than to try and force it to load a whole shell login session that includes those functions (which might also slow down the startup of the program and make it need a bit more ram without much of a benefit).
Scripts can reliably be run from everywhere (specially if placed somewhere in $PATH), functions require some preloading for every single new shell process and making sure the program invoking the shell (be it a terminal emulator or something else) is actually loading it. So as someone who likes to automate everything and often assigns hotkeys to particular commandline oneliners, scripts are much better.. even a symlink might be more reliable than an alias.