Fish shell, a popular user-friendly command-line shell, has announced version 4.2, a new release that builds on the 4.0 series. Among the most visible improvements is an upgrade to history-based autosuggestions, which now properly handle multi-line commands.
Fish 4.2 also improves how prompts are managed: transient prompts that contain more lines than the final one are now cleared properly, preventing visual clutter on screen. Similarly, the shell now hides parts of a multi-line prompt that have scrolled out of view, eliminating duplicated lines after repainting.
Fish is great out of the box!
Check out the Fish for Bash users guide since it explains the main differences.
The few issues I’ve seen for daily use are that export does not work and you need to use
set -x VAR valueinstead,$PS1is not recognized because Fish uses its own prompt system, and wildcards work a bit differently…works for me in fish.
it really is fantastic out of the box. When I switched to NixOS I had decided to stay on zsh/ohmyzsh and it was an absolute slog. it was so slow and didn’t mesh well with the zsh plugins. Someone suggested I try Fish instead as it pretty much could do what Zsh does with plugins but right out of the box. Fish was much faster and indeed could do everything that I had configured zsh to do but I didn’t have to configure Fish at all. It’s great, I’ll never use another shell.