Switching to fish 11 February 2020
I’ve used tcsh as my terminal shell since I’d started using FreeBSD back in 2001. I tried switching to bash a few times but found it pretty irritating.
Last year at The Big Elixir one of the speakers made a pitch for trying out fish and a few weeks back I finally made the switch. I started this page to document what I’d done to get everything setup and help remember all the cool functionality I’ve come across.
Setup
So if you want to get started it’s pretty easy if you’ve already got homebrew installed it’s pretty easy:
brew install fish
Append it to the list of allowed shells in /etc/shells:
echo /usr/local/bin/fish | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
Then you can switch your default shell:
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
At this point you can open a new terminal and should be greeted by:
Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell
Fire up their browser based configuration tool and set your color scheme (I like Solarized Dark) and prompt (Informative Vcs):
fish_config
Like other modern shells fish supports command completion. You can have it parse the man pages and extract options:
fish_update_completions
Environment variables
If you have a directory you want to permanently add to to fish’s search path–in this case I want to add rbenv’s shims–it’s easy:
set -U fish_user_paths ~/.rbenv/shims $fish_user_paths
The set man page has a good explanation of -U:
-Uor--universalcauses the specified shell variable to be given a universal scope. If this option is supplied, the variable will be shared between all the current user’s fish instances on the current computer, and will be preserved across restarts of the shell.
If you want to set an environment variable that’s exported to programs started by the shell, you’d need to add the -x option:
set -Ux PAGER less