Not the aquatic creatures, but rather the
command-line doohickey,
which is not as shit as the other ones.
I’m gradually transitioning to fish
, after accidentally losing a lot of precious data due to a quirk in bash
syntax. Long boring story.
It’s time for new, exciting, different stupid errors.
fish
has a strong fanbase and an opinionated design.
If you dislike those design opinions, at least you might appreciate it has a
healthy degree of sarcasm in said opinions, which sarcasm is sorely absent from
the drearily earnest nerdview of your typical gnu.org
project.
You might also hold that having any kind of principled opinion is better than the
design-by-accumulation-of-tradition-cruft which structures command-line
shells.
Installing
- Ubuntu users can get an updated fish PPA.
- or, macOS/Linux: install using homebrew
Configuration
Modifying the PATH
This is the most confusing thing in fish for me. It is worth reading tutorials, e.g.
tl;dr:
To add a path, use the utility command fish_add_path
fish_add_path /usr/local/bin
To remove a path
set PATH (string match -v /usr/local/bin $PATH)
Adding a path? Say it’s /usr/local/bin
.
Put
set -gx PATH /usr/local/bin $PATH
in ~/.config/fish/config.fish
,
OR
set -U fish_user_paths /usr/local/bin $fish_user_paths
Removing a path?
set -gx PATH (string match -v /usr/local/bin $PATH)
🏗 explain the difference between $PATH
and $fish_user_path
which
will depend upon me understanding how the content of $PATH
magically replenishes
itself and the difference between “universal” and ”global” variables.
Modifying any settings with GUI
fish_config
Traditional config
Put commands in
~/.config/fish/config.fish
.
Extremely traditional config
Aelius notes:
one of the things I like about fish is how there are sane defaults and I don’t need to have any config. Which works for me, because I have no interest in learning fish syntax. I just want a helpful shell, I don’t want to have to know yet another language, and I deeply resent fish every time it doesn’t process the line of posix sh I paste into it from a wiki...
After jumping between several different shells and rewriting my .profile
a number of different times for a number of different shells, I came up with a way to decouple my environment config from the shell I use. My environment always works, I don’t have to learn fish or any other syntax.
I set `/bin/dash` as my login shell.
the first line of my `~/.profile` is `ENV=$HOME/.shinit; export ENV.`
In any interactive shell, dash executes `~/.shinit`, which contains one line:` exec /usr/bin/fish`.
Every config item I need from my shell goes into ~/.profile
, written in easy, conventional posix sh- and I still get to use fish as my interactive shell, without having to go through the trouble of adopting its config to my system.
ssh-agent
Optiligence notes that this minor alteration should work.
eval (ssh-agent -c)
Alternatively, see danhper/fish-ssh-agent or ivakyb/fish_ssh_agent.
Installation:
wget https://gitlab.com/kyb/fish_ssh_agent/raw/master/functions/fish_ssh_agent.fish -P ~/.config/fish/functions/
Append next line to ~/.config/fish/config.fish
fish_ssh_agent
You really need to verify that https://gitlab.com/kyb/fish_ssh_agent/raw/master/functions/fish_ssh_agent.fish
is not anything malicious; this is high security code.
To be more secure, we can get a known-good (IMO) version thusly:
wget https://github.com/ivakyb/fish_ssh_agent/raw/e09c21501c20730634ab80d6bc9329335eabe065/functions/fish_ssh_agent.fish -P ~/.config/fish/functions/
Plugins
You can hack fish. Popular plugin management systems exist also. AFAICT a passable default is oh my fish
curl -L https://get.oh-my.fish | fish
fisher seems to be around too?
curl -sL https://git.io/fisher | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher
It also handles omf
plugins, apparently.
The omf
manual is brusque.
See a helpful blogpost.
I am currently running omf, but since it intrusively changed my prompt I am grumpy at it.
However, I got a better prompt, spacefish.
omf install spacefish
It does need the wacky powerline fonts.
sudo apt-get install fonts-powerline
There are various useful plugins that are not purely cosmetic; For example fzf adds fuzzy history search. z does recency/frequency-based directory navigation.
homebrew compatibility on Ubuntu
Since I use fish
shell as my default but ubuntu automatically executes the bash
startup script .profile
on login,
I ran into the following errors when it tried to run the fish
init in a bash
process when I used homebrew:
bash: set: -g: invalid option
set: usage: set [-abefhkmnptuvxBCHP] [-o option-name] [--] [arg ...]
bash: set: -g: invalid option
...
This is maybe related to an intermittently reported bug in homebrew.
The fix that worked for me was to change the automatically-added line in .profile
to be
eval $(SHELL=bash /bin/brew shellenv)
and to add
eval (env SHELL=fish /bin/brew shellenv)
to ~/.config/fish/config.fish
.
Python environments
virtualenv
If I used virtualenv
on python I would need
virtualfish to
replace python’s virtualenvwrapper.sh
.
Or switch to native python3 venv
,
which is more or less the same thing but works better and doesn’t support python 2.
But if you need to support python 2 at this stage it’s because you are
in some weird enterprise environment with horrid legacy software, so hopefully you can farm this problem out to the tech support team?
Either that or you are barred from using fish
by policy and this is not a problem.
Using anaconda python
You need to do some extra setup to use conda with fish.
~/miniconda3/bin/conda init fish
Or, for older versions,
source ~/miniconda3/etc/fish/conf.d/conda.fish
into ~/.config/fish/config.fish
.
(Replace ~/miniconda3/
with the output of conda info --root
if you used a non-standard install location)
Vars, expansions, extensions, suffixes
Wildcards are minimal, just *
, **
, and brace expansion, mv a.{txt,html
.
For more sophisticated string processing, one defines custom functions (which I never actually do) or use classic subcommands which I do all the time.
for file in (ls *.html)
mv $file (basename $file .html).txt
end
or expansion via string
, which is harder to
for file in (ls *.html)
mv $file (string replace -r "\.html\$" .txt $file)
end
For loops
while true
echo "Loop forever"
end
Test exit status
if test $status -eq 0
echo yeah
end
To simply execute the second command if the first succeeded the command you want is and, which is hard to google for:
../bin/something.sh foo; and cp foo ~/Dropbox/
Temporary variable setting uses env
env FOO=BAR baz.sh
Aliases, custom commands
Writing functions
Incoming
How to use nvm, rbenv, pyenv, goenv... with the fish shell
Deleting history interactively:
history delete
while true
if test (count (jobs)) -lt 5
dostuff &
else
wait # to wait for _any_ job
end
end
NB that only allocates 5 jobs at a time. Nifty.
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