fish - the friendly interactive shell
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fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for macOS, Linux, and the rest of the family. fish includes features like syntax highlighting, autosuggest-as-you-type, and fancy tab completions that just work, with no configuration required.
For downloads, screenshots and more, go to https://fishshell.com/.
fish generally works like other shells, like bash or zsh. A few important differences can be found at https://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html by searching for the magic phrase “unlike other shells”.
Detailed user documentation is available by running help
within
fish, and also at https://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html
fish can be installed:
- using Homebrew:
brew install fish
- using MacPorts:
sudo port install fish
- using the installer from fishshell.com
- as a standalone app from fishshell.com
Note: The minimum supported macOS version is 10.10 "Yosemite".
Packages for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS are available from the openSUSE Build Service.
Packages for Ubuntu are available from the fish PPA, and can be installed using the following commands:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-3 sudo apt update sudo apt install fish
Instructions for other distributions may be found at fishshell.com.
- On Windows 10, fish can be installed under the WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux with the instructions for the appropriate distribution listed above under “Packages for Linux”, or from source with the instructions below.
- Fish can also be installed on all versions of Windows using Cygwin (from the Shells category).
If packages are not available for your platform, GPG-signed tarballs are available from fishshell.com and fish-shell on GitHub. See the Building section for instructions.
Once installed, run fish
from your current shell to try fish out!
Running fish requires:
- curses or ncurses (preinstalled on most *nix systems)
- some common *nix system utilities (currently
mktemp
), in addition to the basic POSIX utilities (cat
,cut
,dirname
,ls
,mkdir
,mkfifo
,rm
,sort
,tee
,tr
,uname
andsed
at least, but the full coreutils plusfind
andawk
is preferred) - The gettext library, if compiled with translation support
The following optional features also have specific requirements:
- builtin commands that have the
--help
option or print usage messages requirenroff
ormandoc
for display - automated completion generation from manual pages requires Python 3.5
- the
fish_config
web configuration tool requires Python 3.5 and a web browser - system clipboard integration (with the default Ctrl-V and Ctrl-X
bindings) require either the
xsel
,xclip
,wl-copy
/wl-paste
orpbcopy
/pbpaste
utilities - full completions for
yarn
andnpm
require theall-the-package-names
NPM module colorls
is used, if installed, to add color when runningls
on platforms that do not have color support (such as OpenBSD)
If you wish to use fish as your default shell, use the following command:
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
chsh
will prompt you for your password and change your default
shell. (Substitute /usr/local/bin/fish
with whatever path fish was
installed to, if it differs.) Log out, then log in again for the changes
to take effect.
Use the following command if fish isn’t already added to /etc/shells
to permit fish to be your login shell:
echo /usr/local/bin/fish | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
To switch your default shell back, you can run chsh -s /bin/bash
(substituting /bin/bash
with /bin/tcsh
or /bin/zsh
as
appropriate).
Compiling fish requires:
- a C 11 compiler (g 4.8 or later, or clang 3.3 or later)
- CMake (version 3.5 or later)
- a curses implementation such as ncurses (headers and libraries)
- PCRE2 (headers and libraries) - optional, this will be downloaded if missing
- gettext (headers and libraries) - optional, for translation support
Sphinx is also optionally required to build the documentation from a cloned git repository.
Additionally, running the test suite requires Python 3.5 and the pexpect package.
To install into /usr/local
, run:
mkdir build; cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install
The install directory can be changed using the
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
parameter for cmake
.
Note: The minimum supported macOS version is 10.10 "Yosemite".
mkdir build; cd build
cmake .. -G Xcode
An Xcode project will now be available in the build
subdirectory.
You can open it with Xcode, or run the following to build and install in
/usr/local
:
xcodebuild
xcodebuild -scheme install
The install directory can be changed using the
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
parameter for cmake
.
In addition to the normal cmake build options (like CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
), fish has some other options available to customize it.
- BUILD_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to build the documentation. This is automatically set to OFF when sphinx isn't installed.
- INSTALL_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to install the docs. This is automatically set to on when BUILD_DOCS is or prebuilt documentation is available (like when building in-tree from a tarball).
- FISH_USE_SYSTEM_PCRE2=ON|OFF - whether to use an installed pcre2. This is normally autodetected.
- MAC_CODESIGN_ID=String|OFF - the codesign ID to use on Mac, or "OFF" to disable codesigning.
- WITH_GETTEXT=ON|OFF - whether to build with gettext support for translations.
Note that fish does not support static linking and will attempt to error out if it detects it.
If fish reports that it could not find curses, try installing a curses development package and build again.
On Debian or Ubuntu you want:
sudo apt install build-essential cmake ncurses-dev libncurses5-dev libpcre2-dev gettext
On RedHat, CentOS, or Amazon EC2:
sudo yum install ncurses-devel
See the Guide for Developers.
Questions, comments, rants and raves can be posted to the official fish mailing list at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users or join us on our gitter.im channel. Or use the fish tag on Unix & Linux Stackexchange. There is also a fish tag on Stackoverflow, but it is typically a poor fit.
Found a bug? Have an awesome idea? Please open an issue.