- On Windows 10/11, fish can be installed under the WSL Windows Subsystem
for Linux with the instructions for the appropriate distribution
listed above under “Packages for Linux”, or from source with the
instructions below.
- fish (4.0 on and onwards) cannot be installed in Cygwin, due to a lack of Rust support.
Building from source
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If packages are not available for your platform, GPG-signed tarballs are
available from `fishshell.com <https://fishshell.com/>`__ and
`fish-shell on
GitHub <https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases>`__. See the
`Building <#building>`__ section for instructions.
Running fish
------------
Once installed, run ``fish`` from your current shell to try fish out!
Dependencies
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Running fish requires:
- A terminfo database, typically from curses or ncurses (preinstalled on most \*nix systems) - this needs to be the directory tree format, not the "hashed" database.
If this is unavailable, fish uses an included xterm-256color definition.
- some common \*nix system utilities (currently ``mktemp``), in
addition to the basic POSIX utilities (``cat``, ``cut``, ``dirname``,
``-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX`` parameter for ``cmake``.
CMake Build options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In addition to the normal CMake build options (like ``CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX``), fish's CMake build has some other options available to customize it.
- BUILD_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to build the documentation. This is automatically set to OFF when Sphinx isn't installed.
- INSTALL_DOCS=ON|OFF - whether to install the docs. This is automatically set to on when BUILD_DOCS is or prebuilt documentation is available (like when building in-tree from a tarball).
- FISH_USE_SYSTEM_PCRE2=ON|OFF - whether to use an installed pcre2. This is normally autodetected.
- MAC_CODESIGN_ID=String|OFF - the codesign ID to use on Mac, or "OFF" to disable codesigning.
- WITH_GETTEXT=ON|OFF - whether to build with gettext support for translations.
- extra_functionsdir, extra_completionsdir and extra_confdir - to compile in an additional directory to be searched for functions, completions and configuration snippets
Building fish as self-installable (experimental)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You can also build fish as a self-installing binary.
This will include all the datafiles like the included functions or web configuration tool in the main ``fish`` binary.
On the first interactive run, and whenever it notices they are out of date, it will extract the datafiles to ~/.local/share/fish/install/ (currently, subject to change). You can do this manually by running ``fish --install``.
To install fish as self-installable, just use ``cargo``, like::
cargo install --path /path/to/fish # if you have a git clone
cargo install --git https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell --tag 4.0 # to build from git once 4.0 is released
cargo install --git https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell # to build the current development snapshot without cloning
This will place the binaries in ``~/.cargo/bin/``, but you can place them wherever you want.
This build won't have the HTML docs (``help`` will open the online version) or translations.
It will try to build the man pages with sphinx-build. If that is not available and you would like to include man pages, you need to install it and retrigger the build script, e.g. by setting FISH_BUILD_DOCS=1::
FISH_BUILD_DOCS=1 cargo install --path .
Setting it to "0" disables the inclusion of man pages.
You can also link this build statically (but not against glibc) and move it to other computers.
Contributing Changes to the Code
--------------------------------
See the `Guide for Developers <CONTRIBUTING.rst>`__.
Contact Us
----------
Questions, comments, rants and raves can be posted to the official fish
mailing list at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users
or join us on our `matrix
channel <https://matrix.to/#/#fish-shell:matrix.org>`__. Or use the `fish tag
on Unix & Linux Stackexchange <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fish>`__.
There is also a fish tag on Stackoverflow, but it is typically a poor fit.
Found a bug? Have an awesome idea? Please `open an
