Moving on to Fish shell (and beyond)

While chatting with one of my WL colleague, I stumbled upon Fish shell. I immediately liked its autocompletion and extensibility mechanisms. After many years using BASH and ZSH, I therefore decided to move on to this new shell.

Unlike the others, it’s not POSIX-compatible.

Furthermore, to get (at least) the same functionalities as OhMyZsh, I chose to install StarShip.

I will then describe how I moved on and updated my existing tools such as SdkMan.

1 FISH Installation

To install it, run this command:

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sudo apt install fish

You must also use a font available on the NerdFonts website. By the way, you can also use the fonts available through your package manager.

For instance, I chose using JetBrains Mono

After downloading it, you can reload your font cache running this command:

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fc-cache -fv

2 StarShip installation

I ran this command:

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curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh

I also added the following command at the end of ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

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starship init fish | source

Due to some WSL2 incompatibilities, I also chose to use the plain text presets running this command:

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starship preset plain-text-symbols -o ~/.config/starship.toml

3 SDKMAN update

At this stage, SdkMan didn’t work at all. To put it alive again, I had to install Fisher and a SdkMan for fish plugin.

3.1 Fisher install

Run this command:

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curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jorgebucaran/fisher/main/functions/fisher.fish | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher

3.2 SdkMan for fish plugin

Run this command:

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fisher install reitzig/sdkman-for-fish@v2.0.0

3.3 Run SdkMan

Run this command:

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sdk ug

Say yes and restart a shell. Now it should work.

4 NVM

I had the same issue with NVM.

I then installed another plugin with Fisher:

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fisher install jorgebucaran/nvm.fish

5 GnuPG

I use GnuPG for signing my GIT commits. Installing Fisher broke my setup.

I then added this new configuration file $HOME/.config/fish/conf.d/config_gpgagent.fish with the following content:

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set -gx GPG_TTY /dev/pts/0

To activate it, restart your shell (again).

6 Conclusion

I can now use FISH for my daily job. As I said first, this article is only a reminder for my next setups (aka when I will broke my GNU/Linux boxes and try to restore them).

Hope it will help you!