Fish shell 2.1 | Hacker News Reader

Fish shell 2.1

fishshell.com

230 pointssiteshwar151 comments

This is the biggest change:

> http://fishshell.com/release_notes.html

> When tab-completing a file, fish will first attempt prefix matches (foo matches foobar), then substring matches (ooba matches foobar), and lastly subsequence matches (fbr matches foobar). For example, in a directory with files foo1.txt, foo2.txt, foo3.txt…, you can type only the numeric part and hit tab to fill in the rest.

This is really brilliant! I always wanted that (without knowing it).

I am looking for something that lets me type the first few letters and when I press the arrow-up key then (maybe in combination with another key), it will only offer those items from the history, which match my previous input.

Something like:

Type:

> ssh

press arrow-up:

> ssh larry@google.com

press arrow-up:

> ssh mark@facebook.com

Ctrl+R.

zsh does that

This is what the arrow-up key in ZSH does by default.

On my box, zsh only searches based on the first word. Other options, in comments above, search on multi words. For example "git push" then up arrow works expected.

oh-my-zsh[1] does that for me. It's a pretty great function.

1. https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

The history-beginning-search-backward widget, which is standard to the zsh line editor, does it. You don't need to pull in all of oh-my-zsh.

To use it, I use:

  bindkey "^[[A" history-beginning-search-backward

Im using oh-my-zsh, but I cant find this one. Care to enlighten me which option or plugin I should enable? :)

Edit: Seems ctrl-up and ctrl-down does the trick.

I'm using https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search

It emulates the Fish behavior (which is just awesome). I'm not sure if it requires oh-my-zsh, but I think it doesn't.

It's actually a plugin bundled with oh-my-zsh, but I copy-pasted the default keybindings from the github page you linked, and it's indeed pretty awesome.

This seems to have been broken for me unless I add DEBIAN_PREVENT_KEYBOARD_CHANGES=yes to my .zshenv. I'm not sure if it was an update to ZSH, oh-my-zsh, or Ubuntu that causes the issue.

bash: "\C-p": history-search-backward in ~/.inputrc

Or in .bashrc:

bind "C-p":history-search-backward

bind "C-n":history-search-forward

fish does this too when you press up arrow key.

You can do that in bash with ctrl+r:

Type: ctrl+r

Type: ssh

Bash says:

(reverse-i-search)`ssh': ssh dude@somewhere.com

Type again: ctrl+r

(reverse-i-search)`ssh': ssh someoneelse@elsewhere.com

Fish does that by default.

Not exactly what you're asking for but: Alt + Up might help.

From the docs: Alt-Up and Alt-Down search the command history for the previous/next token containing the token under the cursor before the search was started. If the commandline was not on a token when the search started, all tokens match. See the history section for more information on history searching. [1]

[1] - http://fishshell.com/docs/2.1/

Up does this by default. Alt+Up is useful for searching a single word through history

I know of three history completion modes in fish.

Full command search: start typing a command and press Up. This will search for entire commands matching your query.

Word search: type any letters in a command, then press Alt+Up. This will cycle only the current word based on a substring match of your query. Useful for hostnames, filenames, etc.

Context-sensitive: If fish 'previews' the rest of a line as a lighter color text, press the right arrow key to complete. This is sensitive to the current directory and available files. If you go into a directory, `touch filename`, `cat filename`, and type `cat`, it will preview `cat filename` for you. Pressing the right arrow key will type it. If you `rm filename` or change directory, `cat filename` will no longer appear.

In my Fedora Linux bash page-up works like that.

Thanks for all the tips! :)

Not sure if that's what you want, but have you tried this in your .inputrc?

  "\e[B": history-search-forward
  "\e[A": history-search-backward

Looks interesting. How would I use that afterwards?

Type, say, 's' and then press your up arrow.

You can also put this in your bashrc:

  bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
  bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

It's one of the things I always tell people to use since it makes using bash so much easier.

In your ~/.inputrc

"\e[A": history-search-backward

"\e[B": history-search-forward

This is actually the feature of fish I use the most and is the primary reason I always install fish on my servers. Automatic history search using the up-arrow is fantastic.

Tcsh does just that by default (at least on FreeBSD).

I have been doing this for over a decade with csh.

With love: I always felt like fish and even zsh are kind of beautiful OCD-induced bouts of counter productivity in the same vain as Dvorak keyboard layouts and Plan 9. We can't handle things being messy and imperfect so we solve it by building our own parallel universes.

What do you do when you have to use a computer without your customization? Perfect is the enemy of good, worse is better, join us on the dark side, all that jazz. :)

Is fish really really REALLY worth it?

Yes.

What do you do when you have to use a computer without your customization?

Uh, by that logic I would only use notepad.exe.

Yes, that would be the other extreme -- just like fish, in the opposite direction. I'm thinking there's a happy medium. But maybe this isn't such a problem, note I prefaced my comment 'with love'.

I'm asking, not telling.

As a zsh user, I am not really seeing the problem. Even Solaris had zsh in the default install. I don't see why avoiding installing an rpm/deb is any better or worse than not.

For regular shell scripts I tend to still prefer #!/bin/ksh and not bourne shell (no bash is not bourne shell).

I have to admit the line of thinking you're advocating reminds me of the vim/emacs "wars". With the "vim is on ALL THE SERVERS", well yeah but unless i'm at a serial console thats not all that convincing as a TRAMP user. I customized tramp so I could edit files remotely through sudo. What do I care about the version vim installed on the servers?

  Even Solaris had zsh in the default install.

Actually, it's still part of the "default" group packages (similar to an installation profile).

The default shell for new users (including root) is now bash though.

Heh, I haven't used 11 much I still remember it being in SUNWCXall or whatever that group was.

vim?

For example, Dvorak layout helped me with wrist pains. I didn't lose ability to type on QWERTY after the transition, it's just less convenient to me now. That applies to all non-customized systems - they are are just less convenient, and that's about it.

I don't see any problem with using whatever pleases you (even if those are very obscure tools), if with transition you don't lose ability to use less convenient (but common) tools on occasion. And you usually don't lose that.

The argument that "fish is not customizable" is not true. Fish is customizable, but at the same time it hides unnecessary complexity from the user. For e.g. You can customize colors in fish, but you can't customize size of the history file (How many people do it ?). fish comes with sane defaults and most of the times you won't need to change any configurations unless you have very specific requirements.

Being able to set a very high limit for my history file and to share history between instances is a major usability feature in zsh for me. Not being able to do that is honestly reason enough to rule out an alternative shell.

250k items is not enough for your history file?

Also, fish shares the history between the shells out of the box, unlike zsh... but it chose to do it in a different way (that is, commands are available even if one of the shells hasn't been closed, unlike bash... but they aren't available right away after entering a single new command, like most zsh configurations that I've seen)

Are we going to use sh and its descendants for the next 100 years? The original shells evolved out of macro processors, and as time went on, more and more programming language features were bolted on, but it's an uneasy fit.

Take it for a test: go write a project euler problem (or any small programming task--doesn't have to be math) in your shell of choice. It's painful.

There are weird features of shell languages that will never go away (globs and unquoted strings sharply limit the design space), but even given those limitations, it's possible to design nicer languages.

I don't fault someone for saying "right now, I'd rather use the default shell my box comes with, because the pain points of switching are too high". But yes, we really do need something to replace it. I think both zsh and fish make nice steps, but I don't think either really meets my hopes.

I don't think we are disagreeing. From the tutorial in the OP:

"If you have a strong understanding of other shells, and want to know what fish does differently, search for the magic phrase unlike other shells, which is used to call out important differences."

"stdin and stdout can be redirected via the familiar < and >. Unlike other shells, stderr is redirected with a caret ^"

That's pretty, no argument there. But I already remember to count the std's from 0, so stderr is &2. Not as pretty, fish is nicer, no argument. But its not MUCH nicer, and I'm going to have to use &2 here and there in my life anyway...

So:

- fish has no dedicated syntax for setting variables

- fish does not have an export command

- fish stores the exit status of the last command in $status instead of $?.

- fish does not use backticks ` for command substitutions. Instead, it uses parentheses.. I'm pretty sure good bash form is $() these days, not backticks. So you're spared the dollar sign.

'etc 'etc. I agree we need something to leapfrog what we have but these changes, while nice improvements, seem minor. At least as far as I can see! That's why I asked. Maybe there's some more neat stuff that makes it a significant improvement.

The syntax highlighting is 90% of why I use it, everything else is gravy.

I'm not sure what you mean about setting variables and export, because here's how I do it:

    set foo bar # sets foo to bar
    set -x foo bar # sets foo to bar and exports it to the environment

Careful with the "in your shell of choice". Someone, perhaps me, will inevitably point out PowerShell, the shell without a proper Terminal app, but with native support for .NET-based programming languages and libraries, including useful well, let's call them "macros" because I've forgotten the official term. http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/06/powershell-command-li... It's really quite powerful, but it's a shame the Terminal tools haven't kept pace on Windows. (And yes, I know of cmdemu, chocolate, but it's not the same as built-in.)

Why is not the same as "built-in">?

I'm asking because i'm using powershell with conmeu for almost 2 years now without a problem. Plus with conmeu i also run vim and farmanager (old school file manager ) in 2 separate tabs.

On a Mac, Terminal ships built-in with sensible defaults. It's easy to launch on any computer, and I often use it from other people's systems. Same with Linux/Ubuntu. Windows, however, now ships with ps.exe, but it's not the same as conemu, console2, obviously, which is why you choose to use them. My only objection is that while Chocolate makes it easier to install them to your own system, so few people do that it becomes harder to use them when you know you'll miss them on other people's systems. I tend to stick to console for when I know commands will work cross-platform.

Really though, it's just the shame that Microsoft hasn't improved their Terminal app in over 16 years at a rough guess, from a functionality standpoint. That's just ... that makes no sense. Not when they're doing so much more to encourage sysadmins to use their command prompts and PowerShell. For a company that can make such great IDEs and OSes, why can't they combine both into a masterful shell window?

I would also like to see a more radical approach. E.g. one making use of graphic features. Why is my auto-completion completely text-based instead of being fully graphical like in a real browser? It's a waste of screen space having fixed row size.

Maybe evolution will also go the other way around: Nautilus and other file browsers have rudimentary shell-like use & feel, e.g. when searching for something. Extending that could create some interesting features.

I really don't think that zsh is born of some desire to keep things from getting messy. That doesn't seem to be what it does in practice anyway, particularly with the popularity of things like oh-my-zsh. Rather I think zsh is born from a desire to have more. More functionality and more customization options.

> What do you do when you have to use a computer without your customization?

How are people running into this situation so often? I don't sit down at my coworkers desks and start using their accounts. On production servers, I still have zsh and although some of my custom utilities are missing, it is not like I am somehow crippled by their absence.

This concern is like being opposed to cordless drills and screwdrivers because "what would happen if you found yourself with only a regular screwdriver?" ...well, what of it? If I found myself inexplicably with only a regular screwdriver, I would use it. Not a big dea. It's not like zsh users turn into blithering idiots as soon as they don't have their fancy PS1 set and are missing a few completion options.

I'm kind of posting too much so I'll stop, I really tried to phrase my questions in a friendly manner but it seems they invite misreadings. Apologies. One final clarification:

I agree with this attitude if indeed this was the case. I don't see how zsh or fish constitute cordless drills and screwdrivers, it feels more like they are the right-y version to the left-y version of the regular screwdriver.

But maybe its because I don't know their killer features, I always try to pay attention to them and play with them occasionally but it never clicked for me why its so much better.

imho, this is a large portion of the killer feature of zsh: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Zsh-Line-Editor.html

Keep in mind also that no matter how civilly you phrase things, your still talking about the "religion of tools" which may draw strong responses to otherwise nice questions.

Generally speaking, no matter how civilly you phrase things, if you question something people feel strongly about, you will draw strong responses. If you must ask said questions, get used to the idea that people will get at least a bit emotional.

Side attack against Plan 9? Plan 9 is neat ;) (and zsh too, I still have found no reason to spend more than 10 minutes with Fish with every new release)

ZSH user here, with plenty of custom additions to it. For me it's not about building a parallel universe - it's about using tools at hand to make my life easier. Whether it be giving me information that I want, when/where I want it, or saving a few tens or dozens of keystrokes, it all comes down to the same thing.

"What do you do when you have to use a computer without your customization? "

I can't answer for other people, but when I am logging into other systems I am very seldom performing the same tasks that I do on my development workstation. I don't need those customizations because I'm not doing the kinds of things that require them.

So when I log into another system, I just use it. I don't try to do the things that I can do on my local system - maintaining awareness of the differences is not a challenging thing.

When I need to use my configurations in other computers, and it's something more difficult than copying a file, I put them online so I can install then with a curl + sh command. But that has happened exactly once. Usually I just need to copy and paste one file.

If by customization you mean changing key bindings, prompts, colors, adding new functions, well, you can change that.

If by customization you mean setting what happens when you write invalid glob, how much you can store in the history, whether prompt beeps on error, whether integers starting with 0 are octal, what regular expression engine is used, and so on, feel free to use zsh - it's great, really, after you configure everything, that is - fish shell won't let you change that by design. This is not a flaw - author believes that configuration is the root of all evil (and I agree with him).

I am not convinced.

How much time can I spend on customizing something to be more convenient and still save time in the long run? Can I spend half an hour to speed up a task I do daily by five minutes? Can I spend a month learning Emacs and save time in the long run? Can I spend two weeks learning how to touch-type?

The answers invariably are very much dependent on your personal work. But to me, the far more important question is:

Can I do anything that makes my life more pleasant? To me, personally, fish really improves my enjoyment of terminal usage. Productivity does not even enter this equation, but I suspect that I work faster when I am happy. I in fact do use fish, and Emacs, for the simple reason that I enjoy using them. I might be more productive with other tools, but I would not enjoy my work as much.

So yes, it is a matter of love. Do what you love, not what pays best.

Actually, that's a calculate-able thing, and Xkcd has already saved us the time: http://xkcd.com/1205/

I have the same comic posted over my desk. I've wondered in the past why the author didn't bother including the cases of 6 hours/day or 1 day/week saved, although I'll admit I have yet to accomplish anything that impressive. I'll just keep it as long term goal to prove the edge cases in xkcd comics wrong. :)

Well said. I try to optimize for happiness and I'm much happier using fish than bash (which I'm reminded of every time I have to temporarily use bash).

Not too be too PC, but OCD != anal. If someone is really OCD about being tidy it's because they think if they're not something horrible will happen.

> What do you do when you have to use a computer without your customization?

As someone who has used an increasingly customized *nix command-line environment for decades, I'll say that this corner-case occupies a vanishingly small amount of my time. I just doesn't make sense to optimize for it. I currently use zsh, which is frequently not available by default. This implies installing a package, and I don't see how that's any worse for fish. I freely admit that my workflow as a developer vs. (e.g.) a sysadmin provides a greater degree of relative control over my day-to-day working environments.

I do have to work in non-customized environments from time to time. I find this no worse than using Someone Else's Keyboard -- maybe there's some clumsiness at first, but you soon get the hang of it. If you switch environments frequently, the switch becomes unnoticeable.

That said, I've also put continual effort into portability and ease of deployment of my customizations over the years. I can run one command on a networked host and have my rcfiles land there and be ready to use. This is pretty easy to do with a git-managed homedir repo, especially on a provider like GitHub where you can fall back to grabbing tarball if needed. I currently use vcsh[1] & mr[2] to manage my repos -- for that I use a bootstrap script hosted in an orphan branch of the same repo.[2] An efficient setup process of this type also makes it easy to integrate with provisioning tools, e.g. Puppet, Chef, or even just shell scripts.

[1] https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh

[2] http://myrepos.branchable.com/

[3] https://github.com/jwhitley/vcsh-root/tree/bootstrap

Great point, my iPad doesn't even have an addressable kernel, let alone a terminal emulator or command line! Why bothering to learn how to drive a car, I'm not even in a car right now, what would I drive?! Is having the freedom to move from place to place REALLY worth it?

You can't have a blanket statement saying, fish is/isn't worth it, just as you can't say that with Dvorak or Plan 9. If you spend a majority amount of your time on one or a few machines, it can very well be worth it to customize your experience on those machines and face the drawbacks on the few times you are on a foreign machine.

On a side note: This is my computer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I think it's different for different people. I have tried fish for a while and then went back to bash because it just didn't feel worth it for me. I'm sure I'll come back to the new version, though.

But back in bash-land, _of course_ I alias "ll" to "ls -Flah". And when I'm on a system that doesn't have this alias, then, well, I just type "ls -la".

As others explained, just because I've customized my work environment doesn't mean I've forgotten to use the plain versions.

Why get a nice car and customize it when you know you'll eventually have to drive someone else's shitbox Ford Focus? Your seat warmer and ergonomic gearshift handle will help you not a whit in that testament to True Detroit Steel.

I like the idea of fish, but I've had issues with other programs assuming things about my shell. Like vim and I think even other programs. There's something fish doesn't do, that other shells like bash and zsh do, that breaks other programs. I can't remember the specifics, but fish breaks stuff for me when I tried it, and I tried it pretty recently.

Anything I have issues with I simply run under bash. I've had very few problems, and use it on my work machine (where I live in tmux and vim).

Edit: I'm running a pre-release of 2.0.0, which I modified to time every command. I was extremely impressed at how simple it was for me to add (not my usual language).

Exporting environment variables is pain, i don't know why some apps pick env others don. Android sdk is problematic for example, go compiler too.

Exporting variables is simple: set -x #{NAME} #{value}; setting Go environment is simple too:

  set -x GOPATH $HOME/go
  set -x PATH $GOPATH/bin $PATH

I actually have an even more complete version of this which allows changing the Go shell cleanly. Dump https://gist.github.com/bpollack/7197532 in your .config/fish/functions directory and you should be good to go.

sweet :) thx

fish's syntax is not POSIX compliant (because fish tries to simplify syntax), so at times it breaks other programs which depends on POSIX syntax. But you can always find workarounds for those problems. For e.g. see the discussion at https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/921 . Let us know your problem and we can help you with migrating.

There are two problems I've found that prevent me from using fish more:

1. <strike>Fish syntax breaks virtualenv</strike> (Edit: Okay, apparently this isn't actually a problem).

2. Fish does not have the equivalent of 'disown' in bash. This is fine if you exit the parent shell normally, but not if you send SIGKILL, which my window manager (wmii and i3) does.

1. Fish syntax breaks virtualenv

You might want to try virtualfish [1]

[1] - https://github.com/adambrenecki/virtualfish

What problems are you facing while using virtualenv ? I use fish with virtualenv and everything seems fine.( You need to source activate.fish to activate virtualenv on fish. )

  . bin/activate.fish

Just so people know where to find this in case they forget, it's in the header of `env/bin/activate.fish`.

# This file must be used with ". bin/activate.fish" from fish (http://fishshell.org)*

Yes, fish is not bourne shell compatible and never will be.
Fish is as the name (Friendly Interactive SHell) suggests an interactive shell. You should just set vim/emacs/whatever to use a bourne-compatible shell. It's one line of vim config: set shell=/bin/sh

actually fish works with ansi-term under emacs without issue

I had similar problems, and found a work around that works great for me:
bash is configured as my default shell. So every program that runs my default shell and just assumes it can use POSIX syntax, gets what it wants (even though it should really just use /bin/sh).
My terminal on the other hand is configured to ignore my default shell and run fish instead.
I also have a line in my .bash_profile (meaning it only runs for login shells) that checks whether it's running in a virtual terminal and in that case exec's fish in a new tmux (because tmux is a terminal emulator, which means that any bash instances within it won't know they are in a virtual terminal and behave like a normal bash).

Thank you, this is really good strategy, I had similar reservations about fish and I think this both makes sense and resolves them.

For vim at least you can put 'set shell=bash' in your .vimrc and it will use bash instead.

I tried fish for a while but found it jarring switching between it and bash when working on remote machines where fish is not installed. I was also surprised when I first started using fish that it can't synchronize history between shell instances, which is a killer feature for me. So after about a month with fish I've switched to zsh.
https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/825
http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-to-automatically-sync...

+1 for this feature, I think it is neat too

That's not a bad idea, but the environments I work on have radically different layouts, and the most commonly used commands on either station are different. The filepaths don't even share a commonality, so what good is the shell history to me? Short of remember SSH destinations.

Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant sharing history between multiple shells open on the same machine. I often have two or three terminal windows open with several tabs each. I use them somewhat haphazardly and would like the history between them to be shared.

http://fishshell.com/release_notes.html

"Previously, a single % would pid-expand to either all backgrounded jobs, or all jobs owned by your user. Now it expands to the last job backgrounded. If no job is in the background, it will fail to expand. In particular, fg % can be used to put the most recent background job in the foreground."
oh! Can fish background tasks now? I haven't being following very closely, I really should update my shell.

It was always possible to background processes in fish. You may be confusing it with not able to background functions (https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/238). We are yet to fix that bug.

The major change here is that `kill -9 %` with no backgrounded tasks would kill all of your processes (before Fish 2.1).
There's now a guarantee that `%` expands to either the last process backgrounded or an error.

I just re-installed Fish this morning. One of the first things I install when I have a fresh install on a workstation :D
The thing I appreciate most about fish is the clever suggestions from my shell history - the simplest things can be the biggest time-savers when it comes to entering obscure commands a few weeks apart (I don't have to look them up each time I do it now)

I've been using Fish for a year now, it's really amazing. Not going back to bash or even zsh.
The only problem I had was getting all vim plugins to work with it, but then I discovered that you can set the shell vim shall use in .vimrc (I set it to sh) and now everything works like a charm.
BTW, I'm loving the fuzzy autocompletion, it's truly a "killing feature".

Installing fish instead of bash was the biggest single productivity improvement that I've ever done. Thanks for your work!

Could you give a little insight into what you liked/disliked about it?

First of all, color; it's a pretty basic thing, but tremendously helps understanding information on screen. Then, there's scripting; I'm a newbie in shell scripting, but being able to pass results of some commands into others with brackets is much more intuitive and comfortable than using the pipe.
The main thing that I disliked is that all web resources give you scripts and advice for bash/sh; I have routinely launched bash to use them, but every time I felt like I'm going to a handicapped version of console.

I just had an argument with some folks around Bash vs Fish, my argument was as simple as "i like it", their was "you won't learn anything, fish sucks, you can do anything it does with a modded bash" ... but that's the point, i don't want to modify and configure, i want it to work out of the box.

Everything is full of regressive killjoys. Do what you like.

Fish works great out of the box but it's also highly configurable. Their argument about not learning anything is void - you learn more by trying new things. Also, using fish doesn't mean you never use bash again, I still dabble around in bash often.

Can anyone tell me if there is a substitute for history expansions such as "sudo !!" or "vi !$" ?

No. But you can always go back to previous command with up arrow key and modify it.

function sudo!! eval sudo $history[1] end
is pretty close.

This is the best answer I found to this question:
> http://fishshell.com/docs/current/faq.html#faq-history
> Alt+Up recalls individual arguments, starting from the last argument in the last line executed. ...
I was really missing history substitution in fish, but now I like this even better.

Maybe it's just because I really like to customize my shell, but I can't stand the philosophy of fish [1]. The relevant part: "Configurability is the root of all evil." I can almost agree with this on many user facing consumer applications but a shell is so far from that.
[1]: http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/design.html#co...

Please see my reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6626993

I installed 2.1 via homebrew and now, every time I open a new terminal window, I get:
bind: Key with name 'dc' does not have any mapping bind: Key with name 'ppage' does not have any mapping bind: Key with name 'npage' does not have any mapping
Does anybody have any idea what causes this / how to fix it?

What's the output of 'bind' and 'bind --key-names' on your system ?

Uploaded the output here: http://pastebin.com/v6ZKrLcp Thanks!

So it looks like the keys to which fish is trying to bind the mappings are not available on your system. I have opened an issue for you at https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/1068 , we will be following up on that. I would appreciate more inputs about your setup. For e.g. version of OS X, your terminal, keyboard type etc.

Sure. I'm basically on a fresh install of Mavericks (13A603), using Terminal.app (unmodified from defaults apart from downloading the Solarized theme), standard British Mac keyboard (rMBP).

Alright. I have updated the issue on GitHub with this information. Let's continue discussing it there.

Thanks for opening the issue. I'm not on github at the moment (or, rather, I am but don't want to link my profile there to my one here), but to answer the question my $TERM is "ansi". I'll keep checking the issue page for any updates in future.
Edit: I can confirm that changing $TERM to "xterm-256color" removes the issue.

Thank you for your wonderful shell!!! I feel the lack of official distro packages (though the fish shell repository works fine)

Thanks for your feedback. Let me just pinpoint it to other users that from this release you can now subscribe to fish shell's repositories by following instructions at http://fishshell.com/files/2.1.0/linux/index.html

You should try to get included in a mainstream distro like Arch.

It already is.

Debian sid ('unstable') isn't hugely behind, at least by my standards of software upgrading. Fish 2.0.0 ended up in there about 8 weeks after release, and I'd expect 2.1.0 should get there in less time (2.0.0 was a change of upstream, and the first release in 4 years, while 2.1.0 is a relatively routine update from a distro's perspective).

I didn't know it was entered in sid, this is a good news; I hope it will enter in jessie too, since my servers use it

Should be in jessie (the current 'testing') too, as of July 22: http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fish.html

Great, I can start using it on the servers too! Thanks a lot

For those who want to give fish a spin, it might be worth checking out the guide I wrote on the topic:
http://hackercodex.com/guide/install-fish-shell-mac-ubuntu/
I'll soon have it updated for fish 2.1.0, Mavericks, and the new PPA locations.

They also have a PPA now[1]. I'm pretty sure I looked a few months ago, when 2.0 hit, and it wasn't available.
[1] http://fishshell.com/files/2.1.0/linux/index.html#dl-ubuntu1...

Yes. We are introducing PPA with this release. You can read the announcement at http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=315735...

I've been using it as my default shell. It simply rocks. It's my best hack friend tool. :)

As a systems engineer, I'm stuck using (mostly) vanilla bash. I'd love to dabble in fish or zsh, but anytime I start it becomes a waste of time.
Upside is I know bash ins and outs :). I'm usually the one-liner wizard of the office.

I have used fish for a few months and I really liked it. I switched back to bash eventually because of a simple fact that esc-. didn't work in fish (which I use really often). If fish provides it, I will go back to fish.

You get this with Alt-Up on an empty argument (so after pressing space). Unlike bash, you can keep holding Alt and press Up repeatedly to cycle through arguments and previous commands.
If you want to be more precise, typing anything in the current argument before pressing the shortcut will do a substring search.

Is that with the new fish? On 2.0.0 /Mac OS X, this doesn't work.

You should set alt as a meta key (in the Terminal preferences under Keyboard) if you're using Terminal.app. This also allows you to use alt+direction to move around in text.

I am currently running fish version 2.0.0 (Love it btw!) - does anyone know if there is a way to manually self update to 2.1? Or do I need to reinstall the package.

What OS are you using ? If you are on Linux, you can subscribe to our repositories from http://fishshell.com/files/2.1.0/linux/index.html and update your package.

On OSX.

Install it using Homebrew (brew install fish).

I'm on OS X and having installed it initially via homebrew, I just did:
brew update brew upgrade fish
I'm not sure how it'll work if you initially installed it via a different method. I believe the standalone package installs into /usr/local, just like homebrew, so maybe installing via homebrew will just update it out of the box?

Even after doing the "type this to fix weird console ouput" I still have weird console output :(

Please explain your problem in detail. If possible, open an issue on GitHub (https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues)

Added an issue at https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/1071

Can you split windows in fish shell? Or is that the job of an terminal emulator, not the job of a shell?

I'd use tmux for that.

No. It's just a shell. Just use tmux or screen for that, which is better idea anyway, as it's a tool specificially for this purpose.

Love fish, been using it for a couple years now, haven't looked back!

I really love fish, is there any way to use fish over ssh?

Install it on remote machine :)

The great thing is, author provided all platform installer. Ubuntu, Debian, Centos, Fedora, even readhat 5,6 and so on. So great for people lazy to compile by themselves for trying little software. Good job! I up-voted you!

It would be nice if I could find a non-OSX download on that page.

When you click on Linux tab under 'Go fish' section, it will list the Linux packages.

Only if you have JS enabled. Which means they went to explicit trouble to make their site not work without JS, which never ceases to amaze me.

can anybody tell me why this Fish shell shows some files by adding "*" at the end of it?

Those files are executables. There is a function 'ls' which wraps ls command and adds --indicator-style=classify parameter to make output more readable.

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