Build Status

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 more on fish’s design philosophy, see the Quick Start

fish generally works like other shells, like bash or zsh. A few important differences can be found at https://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html

You can quickly play with fish right in your browser by clicking the button below:

Getting fish

macOS

fish can be installed:

• using MacPorts: sudo port install fish
• using the standalone app from fishshell.com

Packages for Linux

Packages for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS 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-get update
sudo apt-get install fish

Instructions for other distributions may be found at Windows

• 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 Building from source

  If packages are not available for your platform, GPG-signed tarballs are available from fish-shell on GitHub. See the Building section for instructions.

  Running fish

  Once installed, run fish from your current shell to try fish out!

  Dependencies

  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 and sed at least, but the full coreutils plus find, sed and awk 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 require ul and either nroff or mandoc 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 or pbcopy/pbpaste utilities
  • full completions for yarn and npm require the all-the-package-names NPM module

  Switching to fish

  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).

  Building

  Dependencies

  Compiling fish requires:

  • a C++11 compiler (g++ 4.8 or later, or clang 3.3 or later)
  • CMake (version 3.2 or later)
  • a curses implementation such as ncurses (headers and libraries)
  • PCRE2 (headers and libraries) - a copy is included with fish
  • 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.

  Building from source (all platforms) - Makefile generator

  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.

  Building from source (macOS) - Xcode

  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.

  Help, it didn’t build!

  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-get install build-essential cmake ncurses-dev libncurses5-dev libpcre2-dev gettext
  

  On RedHat, CentOS, or Amazon EC2:

  sudo yum install ncurses-devel
  

  Contributing Changes to the Code

  See the Guide for Developers.

  Contact Us

  Questions, comments, rants and raves can be posted to the official fish mailing list at gitter.im channel. Or use the fish tag on Superuser for all other questions (e.g., customizing colors, changing key bindings).

  Found a bug? Have an awesome idea? Please /klesh/fish-shell