Switching to Fish Shell

I have had a basic zsh setup for ages with the gentoo style PS1.

After reading about fish shell being ported to rust I thought I would give it a try.

fish’s core code has been ported from C++ to Rust
we’ve rebuilt the foundation in Rust to embrace modern computing

What's new in fish 4.0 - fish blog
Release fish 4.0.0 - fish-shell/fish-shell

Advantages #

• Clean Scripting
• Command Suggestions
• Abbreviations
• Web Based Config

Configuring #

Initial config can be done in a web browser by running fish_config.

It is also possible to configure from cli using fish_config

• fish_config theme show (lists builtin themes)
• fish_config prompt show (lists builtin prompts)
• fish_config prompt save <prompt-name> (saves prompt)
• fish_config theme save <theme-name> (saves theme)

There are also additional custom prompts available to download.

I customized the default prompt & am using the ayu Dark color theme.

PWD Dir Sortening #

One thing I didn't like with the default setup is how the path displayed in the prompt was shortened.

I quickly found there is a setting to disable this.

set fish_prompt_pwd_dir_length to the number of characters. Setting it to 0 or an invalid value will disable shortening entirely.

set fish_prompt_pwd_dir_length 0

Fish Functions #

There are some helpful functions built in to fish like fish_add_path.

fish_add_path is a simple way to add more directories to fish’s PATH. It does this by adding the directories either to fish_user_paths or directly to PATH (if the --path switch is given). fish_add_path - fish-shell documentation

## $PATH
###
# HOME
fish_add_path $HOME/bin
# NODEJS
fish_add_path $HOME/node/bin
# RUST
fish_add_path $HOME/.cargo/bin

Fish Shell Additions #

• Atuin for Shell History
• Replace ls with eza
• Replace tree with eza
• Zoxide for directory jumping
• Fish function to extract compressed files
• Support for extracting .tar.zst

Atuin #

Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. Github - atuinsh/atuin

eza #

eza is a modern alternative for the venerable file-listing command-line program ls that ships with Unix and Linux operating systems Github - eza-community/eza

zoxide #

zoxide is a smarter cd command, It remembers which directories you use most frequently, so you can jump to them in just a few keystrokes. Github - ajeetdsouza/zoxide

Download #

The scripts and my dotfiles can be downloaded from github.

Download