fish - the friendly interactive shell

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 downloads, screenshots and more, go to https://fishshell.com/.

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/tutorial.html by searching for the magic phrase “unlike other shells”.

Detailed user documentation is available by running help within fish, and also at https://fishshell.com/docs/current/index.html

Getting fish

macOS

fish can be installed:

• using Homebrew: brew install fish
• using MacPorts: sudo port install fish
• using the installer from fishshell.com
• as a standalone app from fishshell.com

Note: The minimum supported macOS version is 10.10 "Yosemite".

Packages for Linux

Packages for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS are available from the openSUSE Build Service.

Packages for Ubuntu are available from the fish PPA, and can be installed using the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-4
sudo apt update
sudo apt install fish

Instructions for other distributions may be found at fishshell.com.

Windows

• On Windows 10/11, 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 Cygwin or MSYS2.

Building from source

If packages are not available for your platform, GPG-signed tarballs are available from fishshell.com and 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:

• some common *nix system utilities (currently mktemp), in addition to the basic POSIX utilities (cat, cut, dirname, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, rm, sh, sort, tee, tr, uname and sed at least, but the full coreutils plus find and awk is preferred)

The following optional features also have specific requirements:

• builtin commands that have the --help option or print usage messages require man 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
• the :ref:`alt-o <shared-binds-alt-o>` binding requires the file program.
• 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
• colorls is used, if installed, to add color when running ls on platforms that do not have color support (such as OpenBSD)

Building

Dependencies

Compiling fish requires:

• Rust (version 1.85 or later)
• CMake (version 3.15 or later)
• a C compiler (for system feature detection and the test helper binary)
• PCRE2 (headers and libraries) - optional, this will be downloaded if missing
• gettext (only the msgfmt tool) - optional, for translation support
• an Internet connection, as other dependencies will be downloaded automatically

Sphinx is also optionally required to build the documentation from a cloned git repository.

Additionally, running the full test suite requires diff, git, Python 3.5+, pexpect, less, tmux and wget.

Building from source with CMake

Rather than building from source, consider using a packaged build for your platform. Using the steps below makes fish difficult to uninstall or upgrade. Release packages are available from the links above, and up-to-date development builds of fish are available for many platforms

To install into /usr/local, run:

mkdir build; cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
sudo cmake --install .

The install directory can be changed using the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX parameter for cmake.

CMake Build options

In addition to the normal CMake build options (like CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX), fish's CMake build has some other options available to customize it.

• Rust_COMPILER=path - the path to rustc. If not set, cmake will check $PATH and ~/.cargo/bin
• Rust_CARGO=path - the path to cargo. If not set, cmake will check $PATH and ~/.cargo/bin
• Rust_CARGO_TARGET=target - the target to pass to cargo. Set this for cross-compilation.
• BUILD_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to build the documentation. This is automatically set to OFF when Sphinx isn't installed.
• INSTALL_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to install the docs. This is automatically set to on when BUILD_DOCS is or prebuilt documentation is available (like when building in-tree from a tarball).
• FISH_USE_SYSTEM_PCRE2=ON|OFF - whether to use an installed pcre2. This is normally autodetected.
• MAC_CODESIGN_ID=String|OFF - the codesign ID to use on Mac, or "OFF" to disable codesigning.
• WITH_GETTEXT=ON|OFF - whether to include translations.
• extra_functionsdir, extra_completionsdir and extra_confdir - to compile in an additional directory to be searched for functions, completions and configuration snippets

Building fish with Cargo

You can also build fish with Cargo. This example uses uv to install Sphinx (which is used for man-pages and --help options). You can also install Sphinx another way and drop the uv run --no-managed-python prefix.

git clone https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell cd fish-shell

# Optional: check out a specific version rather than building the latest # development version. git show "$(git for-each-ref refs/tags/ | awk '$2 == "tag" { print $3 }' | tail -1)"

uv run --no-managed-python

cargo install --path .

This will place standalone binaries in ~/.cargo/bin/, but you can move them wherever you want.

To disable translations, disable the localize-messages feature by passing --no-default-features --features=embed-data to cargo.

You can also link this build statically (but not against glibc) and move it to other computers.

Here are the remaining advantages of a full installation, as currently done by CMake: - Man pages like fish(1) installed in standard locations, easily accessible from outside fish. - A local copy of the HTML documentation, typically accessed via the :doc:`help <cmds/help>` function.

In Cargo builds, help will redirect to https://fishshell.com/docs/current/

• Ability to use our CMake options extra_functionsdir, extra_completionsdir and extra_confdir, (also recorded in $PREFIX/share/pkgconfig/fish.pc`) which are used by some package managers to house third-party completions. Regardless of build system, fish uses ``$XDG_DATA_DIRS/{vendor_completion.d,vendor_conf.d,vendor_functions.d}.

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 https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users or join us on our matrix channel. Or use the fish tag on Unix & Linux Stackexchange. There is also a fish tag on Stackoverflow, but it is typically a poor fit.

Found a bug? Have an awesome idea? Please open an issue.