How to install fish shell

Fish is a user friendly shell, an alternative to Bash. I use fish as my default shell and I love it, it has some really good time-saving features and it can be themed to look all nice and pretty. This post details how to install fish along with the Oh My Fish framework and bobthefish theme.

Install packages

I’m currently using Fedora Linux as my daily driver and I installed the following packages. Note, fish is the only required package, the others are required for installing Oh My Fish and additional themes.

sudo dnf install fish powerline-fonts git curl

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu, the packages to install are:

sudo apt install fish fonts-powerline git curl

Once the packages have been installed, you can type the fish command into your terminal to enter the fish shell.

Set fish as default shell

To change the default shell for your user account, enter the following command:

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

You will need to logout and log back in for this to take effect. If you want to change your default shell back to Bash, enter the following command:

chsh -s /usr/bin/bash

Install Oh My Fish and bobthefish theme

The Oh My Fish framework allows for easy installation of packages that can extend or modify the look of your shell. Install OMF with the following command:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish/master/bin/install | fish

Once that command completes, bobthefish theme can be installed using the following command:

omf install bobthefish

Bonus command: you can install the fish_logo plugin and have some nice ASCII artwork in your terminal by entering the following command:

omf install fish_logo

Conclusion

Fish is a really nice alternative to Bash and I enjoy running it. I’ve included a short screencast at the top of this post detailing the installation and a few of its features such as tab completion for navigation, command history and command argument completion via man page references. If you’ve tried fish before and/or are already a convert, I’d be interested to know if you have any tips ‘n’ tricks or recommendations for plugins and features. Feel free to leave a comment below.