Fish shell, a popular user-friendly command-line shell, has announced version 4.2, a new release that builds on the 4.0 series. Among the most visible improvements is an upgrade to history-based autosuggestions, which now properly handle multi-line commands.
Fish 4.2 also improves how prompts are managed: transient prompts that contain more lines than the final one are now cleared properly, preventing visual clutter on screen. Similarly, the shell now hides parts of a multi-line prompt that have scrolled out of view, eliminating duplicated lines after repainting.
For me, a full transition never really worked. I’ve needed up using bash for my login shell to keep general compatibility, then GUI terminals, etc, all get started running fish. Most of the scripts I write still use bash, but the thing I interact with 90% of the time is fish and it’s out of the box features cover everything I could want for those times.
There’s also tools like “bass” that help for situations where you need to do “source xx.bash” to get dev environments running.
This setup to me is pretty much painless, and doesn’t require any upkeep. All wins.