Tips on the Fish Shell

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

Tips & Traps¶

1. Configuration files of the fish shell are located at ~/.config/fish.

Installation & Configuration¶

icon makes it easy to install and configure the fish shell.

icon fish -ic

Key Bindings¶

1. Use the built-in function fish_key_reader to tell you how to bind shortcuts.

2. If for whatever reason, Alt+e does edit the current command line in an external editor on macOS, Alt+v is the way to go (if you don’t bother or don’t have time to dig into configurations).

Please refer to Interactive use for a more comprehensive list of key bindings.

Globbing / Wildcard Matching¶

Fish only supports the * and ** glob as syntax. The ? glob has been deprecated and is supported in newer version of fish. For more details, please refer to Fish Documentation - Wildcards (Globs) .

Linting Tools for Fish Scripts¶

The fish shell provides built-in tools for lingting.

• fish_ident: format fish scripts.

• fish -n: check syntax of fish scripts.

Completions¶

1. The built-in fish function fish_update_completions updates completions using manual pages.

2. Instead of writing completion scripts manually, lots of tools support exporting completion scripts for bash, zsh, fish, etc.

   • command-line applications developed using cobra (GoLang)

     • docker completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/docker.fish

     • icon completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/icon.fish

3. crazy-complete helps generate completion scripts based on YAML defined completion rules.