Within 30 seconds of installing fish, I shouted, "How the hell do I disable these annoying suggestions?! This is worse than Clippy!" So I searched fish's docs and learned that it wasn't possible to disable the suggestions! The fish docs state, "Configurability is the root of all evil"[1]. As an Emacs user, this was the most offensive thing I've ever read, which is saying a lot because I once read a work of erotic Star Trek fan fiction about a love triangle involving Dr. Crusher, Wesley and Worf.
I have to admit, I’m not surprised the fish user would footnote with (an unclosed) ¹ on HN. :) As for me, I prefer the predictability of [1] and /bin/bash.
I use fish as my default user interactive shell but I still agree with you. I despise this philosophy of "configurability is the root of all evil" coming from fish and "every preference has a cost" coming from GNOME.
I think these projects are extremely opinionated and they will inevitably drive a lot of users away. Both fish and GNOME strive to provide "good" defaults out of the box but those defaults will never appeal to everyone. I ended up liking fish but I still despise GNOME and everything related to it.
Likewise, I don't use fish for exactly this reason. It seems extremely fine tuned to meet exactly the preferences of its developers, and eschews all further configurability. The Clippy comparison is brilliant, by the way, pretty much summarizes my exact feelings about the suggestions.
I ended up back on zsh. It's a real shame, because fish adds quite a lot in terms of improved subshell syntax and intelligent string manipulation.
Seems like someone should have been able to disable the suggestions using a plugin or something, given that IIRC fish has a plugin interface. But as far as I can tell no such thing exists.
[1] https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html#configurabili...