I use fish mainly just for the quality of life increase that its predictive features and command history give. I also really like that it uses functions to play the role of aliases, and it’s super easy to write and save new functions on the fly.

That said… I haven’t put in the time to really learn its nuances and I still write shell scripts using bash. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but it works for me.

I did Startpage, then self-hosted searx for a while, then switched back to Startpage, and recently subscribed to Kagi, which I very much enjoy. I do not mind paying a provider for search built with the user in mind rather than their advertisers.

There’s a Firefox addon called “Add custom search engine” which will allow you to add a local instance of searx.

You’ll want to give it the full search query, with %s where the search string goes. for you, it’ll be something like:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/search?q=%s

I left Thunderbird ultimately because of dwindling O365 support. How is it now? My work and school emails are all O365, because evidently companies think Microsoft is the only option.