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fish

fish is a user friendly command line shell for UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux.

Fish has a new host, a new domain name, and now also features a wiki. Please help fill it with information!

A list of recent changes in fish is available.
Screenshots of fish in action.
This article about fish from LWN.net is a nice introduction to fish for someone who is already familiar with the basics of a shell.
If you are don't know how to use a shell, read the documentation for a longer presentation on how to use fish
If you are interested in how the rationalles behind the fish design, read the design document .

If you have any questions, comments or other feedback, contact me at axel@liljencrantz.se.

Downloading fish

The latest version of fish is 1.23.0. It was released on January 13, 2008. For an overview of what's new in recent verison of fish, see the description of the major recent changes or the changelog. Version 1.23.0 contains huge numbers of new features, including case insensitive completions, significant improvements to the multiline editing system, a new and simplified key binding system, a large number of new command specific completions, performance improvements and many minor bugfixes. There are many ways to try out fish:

fish is included in Debian unstable thanks to the efforts of James Vega. Users of Debian unstable can use the command apt-get install fish or their favourite package manager to install fish. Users of other Debian-based systems can download and install the Debian package from this page.
fish is included in Ubuntu universe. It can be installed using apt-get install fish.
Users of Arch Linux can download a packaged version of fish from AUR thanks to the efforts of Jan Fader. Please take the time to vote for fish, so that it can be included in the community repository.
fish is included in Fedora extras. Users of Fedora Core 4 and later can use the command yum install fish or their favourite package manager to install fish. Users of fedora Core 3 first have to make sure Fedora Extras is in their yum configuration.
fish is included in Gentoo thanks to Donnie Berkholz. Use emerge fish to install it.
fish is included in the rPath distribution builder. See this page for more information.
Fish is available on SUSE Linux through the Guru repository.
Younès Hafri has made fish available for users of Crux Linux. For more information see this page.
Fish is available under GoboLinux thanks to Isaac Dupree and Daniele Maccari. Just type Compile Fish to install it.
RPM for i386. The fish RPMs are compiled under Fedora Core 4, but have been found to work under any modern RPM-based i386 distributions of Linux.
Source RPM. It should build under any semi-modern RPM based Linux distribution.
Source code in tar.bz2 format. Should build on any modern POSIX-like system.
Source code in tar.gz format. Should build on any modern POSIX-like system.

You can get the latest development version using Darcs:

darcs get http://fishshell.org/darcs/fish

Earlier versions of fish can be downloaded here.

If you wish to recieve news about new versions of fish, you can register for updates at Freshmeat.

Compiling fish

If you want to build fish from source, please consult the INSTALL file. Some features of fish are rather Linux centric. Most command specific completions are for the GNU version of commands.

After installing fish, start it by writing fish in the terminal. To make fish your default shell, type chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish (or wherever the fish binary is installed) in the terminal. You will be prompted for your password.

How to help out

If you want to help out with fish, please consider doing one of the following:

Several fish developers are usually on IRC, on the channel #fish on irc.oftc.net. Log in and ask about what needs to be done!
Join the fish mailing list.
Report bugs by sending an email to fish-users@lists.sourceforge.net. You can browse the list online at Gmane.
Tell me what you think of fish.
The section Missing features and bugs in the fish manual contains suggestions for clever hackers. Dig in!

fish in the news

The first mentions of fish in the news are trickling in. The tiny first steps towards global fame!

Linux.com recently ran a story about fish.
fish is the hottest pick of the month for issue 79 of Linux Format, the UK's best selling Linux magazine.
There was an article about fish on Ars Technica. Read it here.
fish has been added to a german Linux portal called Links 2 Linux.
fish has been added to a Linux portal called Loads of Linux Links.
A site called bitsex ran a short article about fish.
LWN ran an article about fish, written by me. Go read it!
fish was mentioned on a Russian Linux site called LinuxRSP.RU. Babelfish implies that they are saying good things about it!
fish was mentioned on a Czech Linux site called ABC Linuxu. Thanks to therunner for sending me a translation.
fish has been added to the FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory.
fish has been added to a Linux portal called Linux Links.

Thanks

Too many people have contributed bug reports, tests, comments and suggestions to fish to name all. Among the biggest contributors are Philip Ganchev and Netocrat who have taken the time to discuss new ideas at length and made many valuable comments, Yongjian Xu who has contributed many command completions, Jan Fader who has made many improvements to the build system as well as providing Arch Linux packages and James Vega who has submitted many patches correcting various aspects of fish as well as packaging fish for Debian.

Thanks to Mike O'Connor for providing the hosting for the fish site and for registering the fishshell.org domain name.

Isak Savo wrote a nice tutorial on gettext, available here.

This page was last modified on January 20, 2008. If you have comment or suggestions about this page, you can contact me at this address.