From bash to fish

I’m doing a small revolution in my environment from time to time. I think “hey, a cool stuff”, take a deep breath and doing something new. And this is story about my migration from the bash to the fish shell.

Let’s see, what says the official tutorial:

fish is a fully-equipped command line shell (like bash or zsh) that is smart and user-friendly. fish supports powerful features like syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and tab completions that just work, with nothing to learn or configure. If you want to make your command line more productive, more useful, and more fun, without learning a bunch of arcane syntax and configuration options, then fish might be just what you’re looking for!

And this is almost true =) But there is another concrete reason, why I like fish shell:

• Search by history (as an autocomplete by tab)
• More intuitive and clean configuration files
• Vim mode support

I would to avoid unnecessary lyrics, and pay more attention to the configuration and gotchas (from the bash point of view).

First of all - use . command instead source for the inclusion of the script.

. /some-install-path/fish-shell/share/fish/functions/fish_vi_mode.fish
. /some-install-path/.config/fish/themes/fish_right_prompt.fish
. /some-install-path/.config/fish/themes/fish_prompt.fish
. /etc/profile.d/autojump.fish
fish_vi_key_bindings

I’ve used some-install-path because I’m a Vim hacker (an extra pathos), and I want a fresh version for the Vim support, so the manual compilation from github is my way. Then I’ve turned on Vim mode (fish_vi_mode.fish is necessary for this). fish_prompt.fish and fish_right_prompt.fish contain a description for the shell prompt and will be discussed later. If you use autojump, you should also include autojump.fish (if this file doesn’t exist, download it from repo).

set fish_greeting ""

This greeting is very distracting, so disable it. No comments =)

set -x EDITOR vim
set PATH /home/erthalion/.local/bin /usr/local/bin /opt/bin $PATH

We should set environment variables in this format. Pay attention to the PATH variable - don’t forget about /usr/local/bin and /opt/bin (looks like fish shell doesn’t include them by default).

alias goutshow='git fetch; git show origin/master..'

One more observation - we should replace && by the ; or and commands.

Now get closer to the prompt. It described by the two functions - fish_prompt and fish_right_prompt (your C.O.). I have no advices for this section. Really. You can use your imagination and do what you want =) There are my examples - left and right. Only one comment - you may want to show virtualenv name in the prompt. In that case you should disable original by the variable set -x VIRTUAL_ENV_DISABLE_PROMPT 1.

But unfortunately, Vim support isn’t very well in the fish shell. For example, there is no replace (r) command, or undo (u). Actually it’s a horrible problem for me, especially the first one =) And here is my solution of this problem.

I think, fish shell is available for a lot of improvements. All, that described above, is only a base for a convenient environment, and I hope, it will be useful.