Switch to a retro shell, Fish shell

I’ve been using fish shell for the last year, and would never go back to using bash or zsh again. Ever.

All I want is for my shell to be speedy, and helpful. As standard. Without the need to install a mountain of plugins, or have a 200 line configuration file.

Fish is perfect for me. And I’m sure it’ll be a perfect match for you too. Some highlights:

• Invalid commands; if you mistype mkdir and type in mkdi or something similar, the command will appear in red. Instant feedback.
• Valid filepaths appear underlined.
• Autosuggest; while typing a command, autosuggest will appear in grey to the right of your cursor.
• Autosuggest knows about paths and options, and will also pull in your history too.

Your config is in a bit of an obscure location (the only negative I can think of) at ~/.config/fish/fish.config.

If you’re moving from bash or zsh, probably the most important thing you’ll want to set, is your $PATH variable. Here’s how in fish:

set PATH "/usr/local/bin" $PATH

This is just prefixing /usr/local/bin to the front of my $PATH so my homebrew works.

Set your default EDITOR?

set -g -x EDITOR vim

Want to display your current branch when in either a git or Mercurial repo?

function git_prompt
    if git root >/dev/null 2>&1
        set_color normal
        printf ' on '
        set_color magenta
        printf '%s' (git currentbranch ^/dev/null)
        set_color normal
    end
end

function hg_prompt
    if hg root >/dev/null 2>&1
        set_color normal
        printf ' on '
        set_color magenta
        printf '%s' (hg branch ^/dev/null)
        set_color normal
    end
end

function fish_prompt
    set_color $fish_color_cwd
    printf '%s' (prompt_pwd)
    set_color normal

    git_prompt
    hg_prompt

    echo ' >: '
end

This gives you a really clean prompt with just a retro Lost looking >: prompt.

There’s not really much else I want to write about. This was more of a ‘spread the word’, evangelical post. Just take the dive, and switch. You won’t regret it.

Go and read more in the fish tutorial.