Fish – A Smart and User-Friendly Interactive Shell for Linux

The Pleasant Interactive Shell which is called and abbreviated as FISH is a shell for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. It is a unique and innovative command line environment with a number of priceless improvements. Fish is designed to work with any other shell like bash or ZSH. Unlike different shells which disables more than a few elements with the aid of default to save process resource, FISH maintains all of them enabled by means of default in an effort to make most out of it.

Features

• It is a User-friendly and interactive shell
• It has so many powerful features
• Inbuilt Web-based configuration
• It supported Glorious VGA Color and 256 terminal colors
• X clipboard supported
• Error checking capabilities
• Help command to view FISH documentation
• Select suggestions using arrow key

Installing of FISH

To install fish, it should require Python software Properties, use the following command to install python –

$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

The sample output should be like this –

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
   python-pycurl
Suggested packages:
   libcurl4-gnutls-dev python-pycurl-dbg
The following NEW packages will be installed:
python-pycurl python-software-properties
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded.
Need to get 67.5 kB of archives.
After this operation, 358 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main python-pycurl amd64 7.19.3-0ubuntu3 [47.9 kB]
Get:2 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/universe python-software-properties all 0.92.37.7 [19.6 kB]
Fetched 67.5 kB in 1s (45.9 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package python-pycurl.
(Reading database ... 218616 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../python-pycurl_7.19.3-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking python-pycurl (7.19.3-0ubuntu3) ...
....................................................

Now, we should call fish repository as shown below-

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fish-shell/nightly-master

The output should be like this –

This repository contains regular builds of the most recent source of Fish shell, built from the Git master trunk at https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/.

More info: https://launchpad.net/~fish-shell/+archive/ubuntu/nightly-master
Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel adding it

gpg: keyring `/tmp/tmpzn3dsxqj/secring.gpg' created
gpg: keyring `/tmp/tmpzn3dsxqj/pubring.gpg' created
gpg: requesting key 6DC33CA5 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: /tmp/tmpzn3dsxqj/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key 6DC33CA5: public key "Launchpad PPA for Fish shell maintainers" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:             imported: 1 (RSA: 1)
OK

Update Linux packages using the following command –

$ sudo apt-get update

To install fish, use the following command –

$ sudo apt-get install fish

The output should be like this –

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
   linux-headers-4.2.0-27 linux-headers-4.2.0-27-generic
   linux-image-4.2.0-27-generic linux-image-extra-4.2.0-27-generic
   linux-signed-image-4.2.0-27-generic
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
   xsel
The following NEW packages will be installed:
   fish xsel
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1,187 kB of archives.
After this operation, 6,568 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net/fish-shell/nightly-master/ubuntu/ trusty/main fish amd64 2.2.0-680-ga701264-1~trusty [1,166 kB]
Get:2 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/universe xsel amd64 1.2.0-2 [20.6 kB]
Fetched 1,187 kB in 4s (284 kB/s)
.................................

Using Fish Shell

To use fish shell command line, use the following command –

$ fish

The sample output should be like this –

Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell
Type help for instructions on how to use fish

To check version of fish installed, use the following command –

$ echo $FISH_VERSION

The sample output should be like this –

2.2.0-680-ga701264

To get auto suggestion, just write “da”, it will show auto suggestions as shown below-

$ date

The output should be like this –

Tue Mar 15 11:29:50 IST 2016

To get more information about fish. Use the following command –

$ help

The sample output should be like this –

To get intelligent color selection automatically in real time, use the following command –

$ echo
"I am loving tutorialspoint "

The output should be like this –

I am loving tutorialspoint

To make fish as defult shell, use the following command –

$ chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

To switch back to your Previous shell, use the following command –

$ chsh -s /bin/bash

Congratulations! Now, you know “How to use Fish – A Smart and User-Friendly Interactive Shell for Linux”. We’ll learn more about these types of commands in our next Linux post. Keep reading!