The sys admin's daily grind: Fish

Fishy Business

Article from Issue 161/2014
Author(s):

Columnist Charly serves up Fish as the "shellfish" of the day. His conclusion: tasty, but not something you would want every day.

The Friendly Interactive Shell (Fish) [1] is something that attentive readers of this magazine might recall from the "Tool Tips" series [2]. Since then, I've played around with it on a couple of my computers, and here's what I discovered. I immediately enjoyed the well-functioning prediction function. If part of a command is unclear, Fish highlights it in red (Figure  1). At the same time, the shell offers suggestions on how to proceed.

History from Man Pages

Out of the box, Fish derives its recommendations from the history. If I enter the command fish_update_completions at the command line, Fish slogs its way through all the installed man pages – there are nearly 2,000 on my Ubuntu lab machine  – and builds a database (Figure  2). Fish then references them to find additional suggestions for autocompletion.

On the project page [1], the authors may flirt with retro charm – "Finally, a command line shell for the 90s" – but there is much more to Fish than a green-on-black look. On the contrary, Fish is as colorful as the denizens of a coral reef. Commands, parameters, paths, special characters – everything has its own hue from a palette of 256 "glorious VGA" colors.

[...]

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