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FISH-INTERACTIVE(1) fish-shell FISH-INTERACTIVE(1)

Fish prides itself on being really nice to use interactively. That's down to a
few features we'll explain in the next few sections.

Fish is used by giving commands in the fish language, see The Fish Language for
information on that.

HELP
Fish has an extensive help system. Use the help command to obtain help on a
specific subject or command. For instance, writing help syntax displays the
syntax section of this documentation.

Fish also has man pages for its commands, and translates the help pages to
man pages. For example, man set will show the documentation for set as a
man page.

Help on a specific builtin can also be obtained with the -h parameter. For
instance, to obtain help on the fg builtin, either type fg -h or help fg.

The main page can be viewed via help index (or just help) or man fish-doc.
The tutorial can be viewed with help tutorial or man fish-tutorial.

AUTOSUGGESTIONS
fish suggests commands as you type, based on command history, completions,
and valid file paths. As you type commands, you will see a suggestion of-
fered after the cursor, in a muted gray color (which can be changed with
the fish_color_autosuggestion variable).

To accept the autosuggestion (replacing the command line contents), press
right (^a) or ctrl-f. To accept the first suggested word, press alt-right
(^a) or alt-f. If the autosuggestion is not what you want, ignore it: it
won't execute unless you accept it.

Autosuggestions are a powerful way to quickly summon frequently entered
commands, by typing the first few characters. They are also an efficient
technique for navigating through directory hierarchies.

If you don't like autosuggestions, you can disable them by setting
$fish_autosuggestion_enabled to 0:

set -g fish_autosuggestion_enabled 0

TAB COMPLETION
Tab completion is a time saving feature of any modern shell. When you type
tab, fish tries to guess the rest of the word under the cursor. If it finds
exactly one possibility, it inserts it. If it finds more, it inserts the
longest unambiguous part and then opens a menu (the "pager") that you can
navigate to find what you're looking for.

The pager can be navigated with the arrow keys, pageup / pagedown, tab or
shift-tab. Pressing ctrl-s (the pager-toggle-search binding - / in vi mode)
opens up a search menu that you can use to filter the list.

Fish provides some general purpose completions, like for commands, variable
names, usernames or files.

It also provides a large number of program specific scripted completions.
Most of these completions are simple options like the -l option for ls, but
a lot are more advanced. For example:

* man and whatis show the installed manual pages as completions.

* make uses targets in the Makefile in the current directory as comple-
tions.

* mount uses mount points specified in fstab as completions.

* apt, rpm and yum show installed or installable packages

You can also write your own completions or install some you got from some-
one else. For that, see Writing your own completions.

Completion scripts are loaded on demand, like functions are. The difference
is the $fish_complete_path list is used instead of $fish_function_path.
Typically you can drop new completions in ~/.config/fish/comple-
tions/name-of-command.fish and fish will find them automatically.

SYNTAX HIGHLIGHTING
Fish interprets the command line as it is typed and uses syntax highlight-
ing to provide feedback. The most important feedback is the detection of
potential errors. By default, errors are marked red.

Detected errors include:

* Non-existing commands.

* Reading from or appending to a non-existing file.

* Incorrect use of output redirects

* Mismatched parenthesis

To customize the syntax highlighting, you can set the environment variables
listed in the Variables for changing highlighting colors section.

Fish also provides pre-made color themes you can pick with fish_config.
Running just fish_config opens a browser interface, or you can use
fish_config theme from fish:

# disable nearly all coloring
fish_config theme choose none
# restore fish's default theme
fish_config theme choose default

Or, to see all themes, right in your terminal:

fish_config theme show

To update the theme of all shell sessions without restarting them, first
have those sessions define an event handler by adding the following to your
config.fish and restarting them:

function apply-my-theme --on-variable=my_theme
fish_config theme choose $my_theme
end

Then, set the corresponding universal variable from any session:

> set -U my_theme lava
> set -U my_theme snow-day

Syntax highlighting variables
The colors used by fish for syntax highlighting can be configured by chang-
ing the values of various variables. The value of these variables can be
one of the colors accepted by the set_color command. Options accepted by
set_color like --foreground=, --background=, --bold, --dim, --italics,
--reverse, --strikethrough, --underline and --underline-color= are also ac-
cepted.

Example: to make errors highlighted and red, use:

set fish_color_error red --bold

If a variable isn't set or is empty after subtracting any --theme=THEME op-
tions, fish usually tries $fish_color_normal, except for:

* $fish_color_keyword, where it tries $fish_color_command first.

* $fish_color_option, where it tries $fish_color_param first.

* For $fish_color_valid_path, if that doesn't have a color, but only modi-
fiers, it adds those to the color that would otherwise be used, like
$fish_color_param. But if valid paths have a color, it uses that and adds
in modifiers from the other color.

Pager color variables
fish will sometimes present a list of choices in a table, called the pager.

Example: to set the background of each pager row, use:

set fish_pager_color_background --background=white

To have black text on alternating white and gray backgrounds:

set fish_pager_color_prefix black
set fish_pager_color_completion black
set fish_pager_color_description black
set fish_pager_color_background --background=white
set fish_pager_color_secondary_background --background=brwhite

When the secondary or selected variables aren't set or are empty, the nor-
mal variables are used, except for $fish_pager_color_selected_background,
where the background of $fish_color_search_match is tried first.

ABBREVIATIONS
To avoid needless typing, a frequently-run command like git checkout can be
abbreviated to gco using the abbr command.

abbr -a gco git checkout

After entering gco and pressing space or enter, a gco in command position
will turn into git checkout in the command line. If you want to use a lit-
eral gco sometimes, use ctrl-space [1].

Abbreviations are a lot more powerful than just replacing literal strings.
For example you can make going up a number of directories easier with this:

function multicd
echo cd (string repeat -n (math (string length -- $argv[1]) - 1) ../)
end
abbr --add dotdot --regex '^\.\.+$' --function multicd

Now, .. transforms to cd ../, while ... turns into cd ../../ and .... ex-
pands to cd ../../../.

The advantage over aliases is that you can see the actual command before
using it, add to it or change it, and the actual command will be stored in
history.

[1] Any binding that executes the expand-abbr or execute bind function
will expand abbreviations. By default ctrl-space is bound to just in-
serting a space.

PROGRAMMABLE PROMPT
When it is fish's turn to ask for input (like after it started or the com-
mand ended), it will show a prompt. Often this looks something like:

you@hostname ~>

This prompt is determined by running the fish_prompt and fish_right_prompt
functions.

The output of the former is displayed on the left and the latter's output
on the right side of the terminal. For vi mode, the output of
fish_mode_prompt will be prepended on the left.

If fish_transient_prompt is set to 1, fish will redraw the prompt with a
--final-rendering argument before running a commandline, allowing you to
change it before pushing it to the scrollback.

Fish ships with a few prompts which you can see with fish_config. If you
run just fish_config it will open a web interface [2] where you'll be shown
the prompts and can pick which one you want. fish_config prompt show will
show you the prompts right in your terminal.

For example fish_config prompt choose disco will temporarily select the
"disco" prompt. If you like it and decide to keep it, run fish_config
prompt save.

You can also change these functions yourself by running funced fish_prompt
and funcsave fish_prompt once you are happy with the result (or
fish_right_prompt if you want to change that).

[2] The web interface runs purely locally on your computer and requires
python to be installed.

CONFIGURABLE GREETING
When it is started interactively, fish tries to run the fish_greeting func-
tion. The default fish_greeting prints a simple message. You can change its
text by changing the $fish_greeting variable, for instance using a
universal variable:

set -U fish_greeting

or you can set it globally in config.fish:

set -g fish_greeting 'Hey, stranger!'

or you can script it by changing the function:

function fish_greeting
random choice "Hello!" "Hi" "G'day" "Howdy"
end

save this in config.fish or a function file. You can also use funced and
funcsave to edit it easily.

PROGRAMMABLE TITLE
Most terminals allow setting the text displayed in the titlebar of the ter-
minal window. Fish does this by running the fish_title function. It is
executed before and after a command and the output is used as a titlebar
message.

The status current-command builtin will always return the name of the job
to be put into the foreground (or fish if control is returning to the
shell) when the fish_title function is called. The first argument will con-
tain the most recently executed foreground command as a string.

The default title shows the hostname if connected via ssh, the currently
running command (unless it is fish) and the current working directory. All
of this is shortened to not make the tab too wide.

Examples:

To show the last command and working directory in the title:

function fish_title
# `prompt_pwd` shortens the title. This helps prevent tabs from becoming very wide.
echo $argv[1] (prompt_pwd)
pwd
end

COMMAND LINE EDITOR
The fish editor features copy and paste, a searchable history and many edi-
tor functions that can be bound to special keyboard shortcuts.

Like bash and other shells, fish includes two sets of keyboard shortcuts
(or key bindings): one inspired by the Emacs text editor, and one by the vi
text editor. The default editing mode is Emacs. You can switch to vi mode
by running fish_vi_key_bindings and switch back with
fish_default_key_bindings. You can also make your own key bindings by cre-
ating a function and setting the fish_key_bindings variable to its name.
For example:

function fish_hybrid_key_bindings --description \
"Vi-style bindings that inherit emacs-style bindings in all modes"
for mode in default insert visual
fish_default_key_bindings -M $mode
end
fish_vi_key_bindings --no-erase
end
set -g fish_key_bindings fish_hybrid_key_bindings

While the key bindings included with fish include many of the shortcuts
popular from the respective text editors, they are not a complete implemen-
tation. They include a shortcut to open the current command line in your
preferred editor (alt-e by default) if you need the full power of your edi-
tor.

Shared bindings
Some bindings are common across Emacs and vi mode, because they aren't text
editing bindings, or because what vi/Vim does for a particular key doesn't
make sense for a shell.

* tab completes the current token. shift-tab completes the current token
and starts the pager's search mode. tab is the same as ctrl-i.

* left (^a) and right (^a) move the cursor left or right by one character. If
the cursor is already at the end of the line, and an autosuggestion is
available, right (^a) accepts the autosuggestion.

* enter executes the current commandline or inserts a newline if it's not
complete yet (e.g. a ) or end is missing).

* alt-enter inserts a newline at the cursor position. This is useful to add
a line to a commandline that's already complete.

* alt-left (^a) and alt-right (^a) move the cursor left or right by one argu-
ment (or one word on macOS). If the command line is empty, they move
forward/backward in the directory history. If the cursor is already at
the end of the line, and an autosuggestion is available, alt-right (^a)
(or alt-f) accepts the first argument (or word on macOS) in the sugges-
tion.

* ctrl-left (^a) and ctrl-right (^a) move the cursor left or right by one
word. These accept one word of the autosuggestion - the part they'd move
over.

* shift-left (^a) and shift-right (^a) move the cursor one word left or
right, without stopping on punctuation. These accept one big word of the
autosuggestion.

* up (^a) and down (^a) (or ctrl-p and ctrl-n for emacs aficionados) search
the command history for the previous/next command containing the string
that was specified on the commandline before the search was started. If
the commandline was empty when the search started, all commands match.
See the history section for more information on history searching.

* alt-up (^a) and alt-down (^a) search the command history for the previ-
ous/next token containing the token under the cursor before the search
was started. If the commandline was not on a token when the search
started, all tokens match. See the history section for more information
on history searching.

* ctrl-c interrupts/kills whatever is running (SIGINT).

* ctrl-d deletes one character to the right of the cursor. If the command
line is empty, ctrl-d will exit fish.

* ctrl-u removes contents from the beginning of line to the cursor (moving
it to the killring).

* ctrl-l pushes any text above the prompt to the terminal's scrollback,
then clears and repaints the screen.

* ctrl-w removes the previous path component (everything up to the previous
"/", ":" or "@") (moving it to the Copy and paste (Kill Ring)).

* ctrl-x copies the current buffer to the system's clipboard, ctrl-v in-
serts the clipboard contents. (see fish_clipboard_copy and
fish_clipboard_paste)

* alt-d moves the next word to the Copy and paste (Kill Ring).

* ctrl-delete moves the next word (or next argument on macOS) to the Copy
and paste (Kill Ring).

* alt-d lists the directory history if the command line is empty.

* alt-delete moves the next argument (or word on macOS) to the Copy and
paste (Kill Ring).

* shift-delete removes the current history item or autosuggestion from the
command history.

* alt-h (or f1) shows the manual page for the current command, if one ex-
ists.

* alt-l lists the contents of the current directory, unless the cursor is
over a directory argument, in which case the contents of that directory
will be listed.

* alt-o opens the file at the cursor in a pager. If the cursor is in com-
mand position and the command is a script, it will instead open that
script in your editor. The editor is chosen from the first available of
the $VISUAL or $EDITOR variables.

* alt-p adds the string &| less; to the end of the job under the cursor.
The result is that the output of the command will be paged. If you set
the PAGER variable, its value is used instead of less.

* alt-w prints a short description of the command under the cursor.

* alt-e edits the current command line in an external editor. The editor is
chosen from the first available of the $VISUAL or $EDITOR variables.

* alt-v Same as alt-e.

* alt-s Prepends sudo to the current commandline. If the commandline is
empty, prepend sudo to the last commandline. If sudo is not installed,
various similar commands are tried: doas, please, and run0.

* ctrl-space Inserts a space without expanding an abbreviation. For vi
mode, this only applies to insert-mode.

Emacs mode commands
To enable emacs mode, use fish_default_key_bindings. This is also the de-
fault.

* home or ctrl-a moves the cursor to the beginning of the line.

* end or ctrl-e moves to the end of line. If the cursor is already at the
end of the line, and an autosuggestion is available, end or ctrl-e ac-
cepts the autosuggestion.

* ctrl-b, ctrl-f move the cursor one character left or right or accept the
autosuggestion just like the left (^a) and right (^a) shared bindings
(which are available as well).

* alt-b, alt-f move the cursor one word left or right, or accept one word
of the autosuggestion. If the command line is empty, moves forward/back-
ward in the directory history instead.

* ctrl-n, ctrl-p move the cursor up/down or through history, like the up
and down arrow shared bindings.

* delete or backspace or ctrl-h removes one character forwards or backwards
respectively.

* ctrl-backspace removes one word backwards and alt-backspace removes one
argument backwards. On macOS, it's the other way round.

* alt-< moves to the beginning of the commandline, alt-> moves to the end.

* ctrl-k deletes from the cursor to the end of line (moving it to the Copy
and paste (Kill Ring)).

* escape and ctrl-g cancel the current operation. Immediately after an un-
ambiguous completion this undoes it.

* alt-c capitalizes the current word.

* alt-u makes the current word uppercase.

* ctrl-t transposes the last two characters.

* alt-t transposes the last two words.

* ctrl-z, ctrl-_ (ctrl-/ on some terminals) undo the most recent edit of
the line.

* alt-/ or ctrl-shift-z reverts the most recent undo.

* ctrl-r opens the history in a pager. This will show history entries
matching the search, a few at a time. Pressing ctrl-r again will search
older entries, pressing ctrl-s (that otherwise toggles pager search) will
go to newer entries. The search bar will always be selected.

You can change these key bindings using the bind builtin.

Vi mode commands
Vi mode allows for the use of vi-like commands at the prompt. Initially,
insert mode is active. escape enters command mode. The commands available
in command, insert and visual mode are described below. Vi mode shares some
bindings with Emacs mode.

To enable vi mode, use fish_vi_key_bindings. It is also possible to add
all Emacs mode bindings to vi mode by using something like:

function fish_user_key_bindings
# Execute this once per mode that emacs bindings should be used in
fish_default_key_bindings -M insert

# Then execute the vi-bindings so they take precedence when there's a conflict.
# Without --no-erase fish_vi_key_bindings will default to
# resetting all bindings.
# The argument specifies the initial mode (insert, "default" or visual).
fish_vi_key_bindings --no-erase insert
end

When in vi mode, the fish_mode_prompt function will display a mode indica-
tor to the left of the prompt. To disable this feature, override it with an
empty function. To display the mode elsewhere (like in your right prompt),
use the output of the fish_default_mode_prompt function.

When a binding switches the mode, it will repaint the mode-prompt if it ex-
ists, and the rest of the prompt only if it doesn't. So if you want a
mode-indicator in your fish_prompt, you need to erase fish_mode_prompt e.g.
by adding an empty file at ~/.config/fish/functions/fish_mode_prompt.fish.
(Bindings that change the mode are supposed to call the repaint-mode bind
function, see bind)

The fish_vi_cursor function will be used to change the cursor's shape de-
pending on the mode in supported terminals. The following snippet can be
used to manually configure cursors after enabling vi mode:

# Emulates vim's cursor shape behavior
# Set the normal and visual mode cursors to a block
set fish_cursor_default block
# Set the insert mode cursor to a line
set fish_cursor_insert line
# Set the replace mode cursors to an underscore
set fish_cursor_replace_one underscore
set fish_cursor_replace underscore
# Set the external cursor to a line. The external cursor appears when a command is started.
# The cursor shape takes the value of fish_cursor_default when fish_cursor_external is not specified.
set fish_cursor_external line
# The following variable can be used to configure cursor shape in
# visual mode, but due to fish_cursor_default, is redundant here
set fish_cursor_visual block

Additionally, blink can be added after each of the cursor shape parameters
to set a blinking cursor in the specified shape.

Fish knows the shapes "block", "line" and "underscore", other values will
be ignored.

If the cursor shape does not appear to be changing after setting the above
variables, it's likely your terminal emulator does not support the capabil-
ities necessary to do this.

Command mode
Command mode is also known as normal mode.

* h moves the cursor left.

* l moves the cursor right.

* k and j search the command history for the previous/next command contain-
ing the string that was specified on the commandline before the search
was started. If the commandline was empty when the search started, all
commands match. See the history section for more information on history
searching. In multi-line commands, they move the cursor up and down re-
spectively.

* i enters insert mode at the current cursor position.

* I enters insert mode at the beginning of the line.

* v enters visual mode at the current cursor position.

* a enters insert mode after the current cursor position.

* A enters insert mode at the end of the line.

* o inserts a new line under the current one and enters insert mode

* O (capital-"o") inserts a new line above the current one and enters
insert mode

* 0 (zero) moves the cursor to beginning of line (remaining in command
mode).

* d,d deletes the current line and moves it to the Copy and paste (Kill
Ring).

* D deletes text after the current cursor position and moves it to the Copy
and paste (Kill Ring).

* p pastes text from the Copy and paste (Kill Ring).

* u undoes the most recent edit of the command line.

* ctrl-r redoes the most recent edit.

* [ and ] search the command history for the previous/next token containing
the token under the cursor before the search was started. See the history
section for more information on history searching.

* / opens the history in a pager. This will show history entries matching
the search, a few at a time. Pressing it again will search older entries,
pressing ctrl-s (that otherwise toggles pager search) will go to newer
entries. The search bar will always be selected.

* backspace moves the cursor left.

* g,g / G moves the cursor to the beginning/end of the commandline, respec-
tively.

* ~ toggles the case (upper/lower) of the character and moves to the next
character.

* g,u lowercases to the end of the word.

* g,U uppercases to the end of the word.

* :,q exits fish.

Insert mode
* escape enters command mode.

* backspace removes one character to the left.

* ctrl-n accepts the autosuggestion.

Visual mode
* left (``^a`) and right`(``^a`) extend the selection backward/forward by one
character.

* h moves the cursor left.

* l moves the cursor right.

* k moves the cursor up.

* j moves the cursor down.

* b and w extend the selection backward/forward by one word.

* d and x move the selection to the Copy and paste (Kill Ring) and enter
command mode.

* escape and ctrl-c enter command mode.

* c and s remove the selection and switch to insert mode.

* X moves the entire line to the Copy and paste (Kill Ring), and enters
command mode.

* y copies the selection to the Copy and paste (Kill Ring), and enters
command mode.

* ~ toggles the case (upper/lower) on the selection, and enters command
mode.

* g,u lowercases the selection, and enters command mode.

* g,U uppercases the selection, and enters command mode.

* ",*,y copies the selection to the clipboard, and enters command mode.

Custom bindings
In addition to the standard bindings listed here, you can also define your
own with bind:

# Prints ``^C`` and a new prompt
bind ctrl-c cancel-commandline

Put bind statements into config.fish or a function called
fish_user_key_bindings.

If you change your mind on a binding and want to go back to fish's default,
you can erase it again:

bind --erase ctrl-c

Fish remembers its preset bindings and so it will take effect again. This
saves you from having to remember what it was before and add it again your-
self.

If you use vi bindings, note that bind will by default bind keys in command
mode. To bind something in insert mode:

bind --mode insert ctrl-c 'commandline -r ""'

Key sequences
To find out the name of a key, you can use fish_key_reader.

> fish_key_reader # Press Alt + right-arrow
Press a key:
bind alt-right 'do something'

Note that the historical way the terminal encodes keys and sends them to
the application (fish, in this case) makes a lot of combinations indistin-
guishable or unbindable. In the usual encoding, ctrl-i is the same as the
tab key, and shift cannot be detected when ctrl is also pressed.

There are more powerful encoding schemes, and fish tries to tell the termi-
nal to turn them on, but there are still many terminals that do not support
them. When fish_key_reader prints the same sequence for two different keys,
then that is because your terminal sends the same sequence for them, and
there isn't anything fish can do about it. It is our hope that these
schemes will become more widespread, making input more flexible.

In the historical scheme, escape is the same thing as alt in a terminal. To
distinguish between pressing escape and then another key, and pressing alt
and that key (or an escape sequence the key sends), fish waits for a cer-
tain time after seeing an escape character. This is configurable via the
fish_escape_delay_ms variable.

If you want to be able to press escape and then a character and have it
count as alt+that character, set it to a higher value, e.g.:

set -g fish_escape_delay_ms 100

Similarly, to disambiguate other keypresses where you've bound a subse-
quence and a longer sequence, fish has fish_sequence_key_delay_ms:

# This binds the sequence j,k to switch to normal mode in vi mode.
# If you kept it like that, every time you press "j",
# fish would wait for a "k" or other key to disambiguate
bind -M insert -m default j,k cancel repaint-mode

# After setting this, fish only waits 200ms for the "k",
# or decides to treat the "j" as a separate sequence, inserting it.
set -g fish_sequence_key_delay_ms 200

Copy and paste (Kill Ring)
Fish uses an Emacs-style kill ring for copy and paste functionality. For
example, use ctrl-k (kill-line) to cut from the current cursor position to
the end of the line. The string that is cut (a.k.a. killed in emacs-ese) is
inserted into a list of kills, called the kill ring. To paste the latest
value from the kill ring (emacs calls this "yanking") use ctrl-y (the yank
input function). After pasting, use alt-y (yank-pop) to rotate to the pre-
vious kill.

Copy and paste from outside are also supported, both via the ctrl-x /
ctrl-v bindings (the fish_clipboard_copy and fish_clipboard_paste functions
[3]) and via the terminal's paste function, for which fish enables "Brack-
eted Paste Mode", so it can tell a paste from manually entered text. In
addition, when pasting inside single quotes, pasted single quotes and back-
slashes are automatically escaped so that the result can be used as a sin-
gle token by closing the quote after. Kill ring entries are stored in
fish_killring variable.

The commands begin-selection and end-selection (unbound by default; used
for selection in vi visual mode) control text selection together with cur-
sor movement commands that extend the current selection. The variable
fish_cursor_selection_mode can be used to configure if that selection
should include the character under the cursor (inclusive) or not (exclu-
sive). The default is exclusive, which works well with any cursor shape.
For vi mode, and particularly for the block or underscore cursor shapes you
may prefer inclusive.

[3] These rely on external tools. Currently xsel, xclip, wl-copy/wl-paste
and pbcopy/pbpaste are supported.

Multiline editing
The fish commandline editor can be used to work on commands that are sev-
eral lines long. There are three ways to make a command span more than a
single line:

* Pressing the enter key while a block of commands is unclosed, such as
when one or more block commands such as for, begin or if do not have a
corresponding end command.

* Pressing alt-enter instead of pressing the enter key.

* By inserting a backslash (\) character before pressing the enter key, es-
caping the newline.

The fish commandline editor works exactly the same in single line mode and
in multiline mode. To move between lines use the left and right arrow keys
and other such keyboard shortcuts.

Searchable command history
After a command has been executed, it is remembered in the history list.
Any duplicate history items are automatically removed. By pressing the up
and down keys, you can search forwards and backwards in the history. If the
current command line is not empty when starting a history search, only the
commands containing the string entered into the command line are shown.

By pressing alt-up (^a) and alt-down (^a), a history search is also per-
formed, but instead of searching for a complete commandline, each command-
line is broken into separate elements like it would be before execution,
and the history is searched for an element matching that under the cursor.

For more complicated searches, you can press ctrl-r to open a pager that
allows you to search the history. It shows a limited number of entries in
one page, press ctrl-r [4] again to move to the next page and ctrl-s [5] to
move to the previous page. You can change the text to refine your search.

History searches are case-insensitive unless the search string contains an
uppercase character. You can stop a search to edit your search string by
pressing escape or pagedown.

Prefixing the commandline with a space will prevent the entire line from
being stored in the history. It will still be available for recall until
the next command is executed, but will not be stored on disk. This is to
allow you to fix misspellings and such.

The command history is stored in the file ~/.local/share/fish/fish_history
(or $XDG_DATA_HOME/fish/fish_history if that variable is set) by default.
However, you can set the fish_history environment variable to change the
name of the history session (resulting in a <session>_history file); both
before starting the shell and while the shell is running.

See the history command for other manipulations.

Examples:

To search for previous entries containing the word 'make', type make in the
console and press the up key.

If the commandline reads cd m, place the cursor over the m character and
press alt-up (^a) to search for previously typed words containing 'm'.

[4] Or another binding that triggers the history-pager input function. See
bind for a list.

[5] Or another binding that triggers the pager-toggle-search input func-
tion.

PRIVATE MODE
Fish has a private mode, in which command history will not be written to
the history file on disk. To enable it, either set $fish_private_mode to a
non-empty value, or launch with fish --private (or fish -P for short).

If you launch fish with -P, it both hides old history and prevents writing
history to disk. This is useful to avoid leaking personal information (e.g.
for screencasts) or when dealing with sensitive information.

You can query the variable fish_private_mode (if test -n "$fish_pri-
vate_mode" ...) if you would like to respect the user's wish for privacy
and alter the behavior of your own fish scripts.

NAVIGATING DIRECTORIES
Navigating directories is usually done with the cd command, but fish offers
some advanced features as well.

The current working directory can be displayed with the pwd command, or the
$PWD special variable. Usually your prompt already does this.

Directory history
Fish automatically keeps a trail of the recent visited directories with cd
by storing this history in the dirprev and dirnext variables.

Several commands are provided to interact with this directory history:

* dirh prints the history

* cdh displays a prompt to quickly navigate the history

* prevd moves backward through the history. It is bound to alt-left (^a)

* nextd moves forward through the history. It is bound to alt-right (^a)

Directory stack
Another set of commands, usually also available in other shells like bash,
deal with the directory stack. Stack handling is not automatic and needs
explicit calls of the following commands:

* dirs prints the stack

* pushd adds a directory on top of the stack and makes it the current work-
ing directory

* popd removes the directory on top of the stack and changes the current
working directory

AUTHOR
fish-shell developers

4.6 Aug 01, 2026 FISH-INTERACTIVE(1)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fish-interactive&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>

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