Platform Changes

Starting with version 2.5, fish requires a more up-to-date version of C++, specifically C++11 (from 2011). This affects some older platforms:

Linux

For users building from source, GCC's g++ 4.8 or later, or LLVM's clang 3.3 or later, are known to work. Older platforms may require a newer compiler installed.

Unfortunately, because of the complexity of the toolchain, binary packages are no longer published by the fish-shell developers for the following platforms:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 5 & 6 for 64-bit builds
• Ubuntu 12.04 (EoLTS April 2017)
• Debian 7 (EoLTS May 2018)

Installing newer version of fish on these systems will require building from source.

OS X SnowLeopard

Starting with version 2.5, fish requires a C++11 standard library on OS X 10.6 ("SnowLeopard"). If this library is not installed, you will see this error: dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib

MacPorts is the easiest way to obtain this library. After installing the SnowLeopard MacPorts release from the install page, run:

sudo port -v install libcxx

Now fish should launch successfully. (Please open an issue if it does not.)

This is only necessary on 10.6. OS X 10.7 and later include the required library by default.

Other significant changes

• Attempting to exit with running processes in the background produces a warning, then signals them to terminate if a second attempt to exit is made. This brings the behaviour for running background processes into line with stopped processes. (#3497)
• random can now have start, stop and step values specified, or the new choice subcommand can be used to pick an argument from a list (#3619).
• A new key bindings preset, fish_hybrid_key_bindings, including all the Emacs-style and Vi-style bindings, which behaves like fish_vi_key_bindings in fish 2.3.0 (#3556).
• function now returns an error when called with invalid options, rather than defining the function anyway (#3574). This was a regression present in fish 2.3 and 2.4.0.
• fish no longer prints a warning when it identifies a running instance of an old version (2.1.0 and earlier). Changes to universal variables may not propagate between these old versions and 2.5b1.
• Improved compatiblity with Android (#3585), MSYS/mingw (#2360), Solaris (#3456, #3340)
• Like other shells, the test builting now returns an error for numeric operations on invalid integers (#3346, #3581).
• complete no longer recognises --authoritative and --unauthoritative options, and they are marked as obsolete.
• status accepts subcommands, and should be used like status is-interactive. The old options continue to be supported for the foreseeable future (#3526), although only one subcommand or option can be specified at a time.
• Selection mode (used with "begin-selection") no longer selects a character the cursor does not move over (#3684).
• List indexes are handled better, and a bit more liberally in some cases (echo $PATH[1 .. 3] is now valid) (#3579).
• The fish_mode_prompt function is now simply a stub around fish_default_mode_prompt, which allows the mode prompt to be included more easily in customised prompt functions (#3641).

Notable fixes and improvements

• alias, run without options or arguments, lists all defined aliases, and aliases now include a description in the function signature that identifies them.
• complete accepts empty strings as descriptions (#3557).
• command accepts -q/--quiet in combination with --search (#3591), providing a simple way of checking whether a command exists in scripts.
• Abbreviations can now be renamed with abbr --rename OLD_KEY NEW_KEY (#3610).
• The command synopses printed by --help options work better with copying and pasting (#2673).
• help launches the browser specified by the $fish_help_browser variable if it is set (#3131).
• History merging could lose items under certain circumstances and is now fixed (#3496).
• The $status variable is now set to 123 when a syntactically invalid command is entered (#3616).
• Exiting fish now signals all background processes to terminate, not just stopped jobs (#3497).
• A new prompt_hostname function which prints a hostname suitable for use in prompts (#3482).
• The __fish_man_page function (bound to Alt-h by default) now tries to recognize subcommands (e.g. git add will now open the "git-add" man page) (#3678).
• A new function edit_command_buffer (bound to Alt-e & Alt-v by default) to edit the command buffer in an external editor (#1215, #3627).
• set_color now supports italics (--italics), dim (--dim) and reverse (--reverse) modes (#3650).
• Filesystems with very slow locking (eg incorrectly-configured NFS) will no longer slow fish down (#685).
• Improved completions for apt (#3695), fusermount (#3642), make (#3628), netctl-auto (#3378), nmcli (#3648), pygmentize (#3378), and tar (#3719).
• Added completions for:
  • VBoxHeadless (#3378)
  • VBoxSDL (#3378)
  • base64 (#3378)
  • caffeinate (#3524)
  • dconf (#3638)
  • dig (#3495)
  • dpkg-reconfigure (#3521 & #3522)
  • feh (#3378)
  • launchctl (#3682)
  • lxc (#3554 & #3564),
  • mddiagnose (#3524)
  • mdfind (#3524)
  • mdimport (#3524)
  • mdls (#3524)
  • mdutil (#3524)
  • mkvextract (#3492)
  • nvram (#3524)
  • objdump (#3378)
  • sysbench (#3491)
  • tmutil (#3524)