This How-To will show you how to install and run fish to test out its functionality. If you decide to use fish as your default shell, the last part of this How-To will show you how to make it your default.
Hopefully a few of you will try out fish. I've been using it for a few weeks and find that it's very useful for my day-to-day work. Please read a few of the posts in this thread by liljencrantz to get an idea for how well fish works as a scripting platform.
Why fish makes an excellent shell for anybody who just wants a better way to use their command line interface:
- Context-aware tab completion ('bunzip {tab}' shows all bz2 archives, cd {tab} shows all directories)
- tab completion shows more info about matching files
- tab completion uses scrollable list for matches. Use arrows to scroll.
- tab completion can complete paramaters for built-in commands (eg. ls -{tab} will show paramaters for the ls command)
- Ctrl-Y pasting and Ctrl-K cutting uses the X Windows clipboard.
- Search command history: type first part of previously run command, then use arrows to scoll through matching commands. Or just use arrows to scroll all commands like in bash.
- Syntax highlighting of commands as you type.
Home page: http://roo.no-ip.org/fish/
Features: http://roo.no-ip.org/fish/user_doc/difference.html
How to install so you can test fish without actually making it your default shell:
- Download the latest deb from http://roo.no-ip.org/fish/ (currently version 1.8)
- sudo dpkg -i fish_1.8_i386.deb (substitute the filename for the version you have downloaded)
- run 'fish' to try it out temporarily (goes away after you close the current terminal window or run 'exit')
How to use fish as your default shell:
- run 'sudo gedit /etc/shells' and add '/usr/local/bin/fish' as a new last line.
- run 'chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish'.
- logout then back in to make shell change appear. Now every time you open a terminal you will get fish instead of bash.
- You can run 'chsh -s /bin/bash' at any time to make bash your default shell again.
Bookmarks