Notable improvements and fixes

• A new path builtin command to filter and transform paths (#7659, #8958). For example, to list all the separate extensions used on files in /usr/share/man (after removing one extension, commonly a “.gz”):

path filter -f /usr/share/man/** | path change-extension '' | path extension | path sort -u

• Tab (or any key bound to complete) now expands wildcards instead of invoking completions, if there is a wildcard in the path component under the cursor (#954, #8593).
• Scripts can now catch and handle the SIGINT and SIGTERM signals, either via function --on-signal or with trap (#6649).

Deprecations and removed features

• The stderr-nocaret feature flag, introduced in fish 3.0 and enabled by default in fish 3.1, has been made read-only. That means it is no longer possible to disable it, and code supporting the ^ redirection has been removed (#8857, #8865).

To recap: fish used to support ^ to redirect stderr, so you could use commands like:

test "$foo" -gt 8 ^/dev/null

to ignore error messages. This made the ^ symbol require escaping and quoting, and was a bit of a weird shortcut considering 2> already worked, which is only one character longer.

So the above can simply become:

test "$foo" -gt 8 2>/dev/null

• The following feature flags have been enabled by default:
  • regex-easyesc, which makes string replace -r not do a superfluous round of unescaping in the replacement expression. That means e.g. to escape any “a” or “b” in an argument you can use string replace -ra '([ab])' '\\\\\\\\$1' foobar instead of needing 8 backslashes.

This only affects the replacement expression, not the match expression (the '([ab])' part in the example). A survey of plugins on GitHub did not turn up any affected code, so we do not expect this to affect many users.

This flag was introduced in fish 3.1. * ampersand-nobg-in-token, which means that & will not create a background job if it occurs in the middle of a word. For example, echo foo&bar will print “foo&bar” instead of running echo foo in the background and then starting bar as a second job.

Reformatting with fish_indent would already introduce spaces, turning echo foo&bar into echo foo & bar.

This flag was introduced in fish 3.4.

To turn off these flags, add no-regex-easyesc or no-ampersand-nobg-in-token to `fish_features`` and restart fish:

set -Ua fish_features no-regex-easyesc

Like stderr-nocaret, they will eventually be made read-only.

• Most string subcommands no longer append a newline to their input if the input didn’t have one (#8473, #3847)
• Fish’s escape sequence removal (like for string length --visible or to figure out how wide the prompt is) no longer has special support for non-standard color sequences like from Data General terminals, e.g. the Data General Dasher D220 from 1984. This removes a bunch of work in the common case, allowing string length --visible to be much faster with unknown escape sequences. We don’t expect anyone to have ever used fish with such a terminal (#8769).
• Code to upgrade universal variables from fish before 3.0 has been removed. Users who upgrade directly from fish versions 2.7.1 or before will have to set their universal variables & abbreviations again. (#8781)
• The meaning of an empty color variable has changed (#8793). Previously, when a variable was set but empty, it would be interpreted as the “normal” color. Now, empty color variables cause the same effect as unset variables - the general highlighting variable for that type is used instead. For example:

set -g fish_color_command blue
set -g fish_color_keyword

would previously make keywords “normal” (usually white in a dark terminal). Now it’ll make them blue. To achieve the previous behavior, use the normal color explicitly: set -g fish_color_keyword normal.

This makes it easier to make self-contained color schemes that don’t accidentally use color that was set before. fish_config has been adjusted to set known color variables that a theme doesn’t explicitly set to empty.

• eval is now a reserved keyword, so it can’t be used as a function name. This follows set and read, and is necessary because it can’t be cleanly shadowed by a function - at the very least eval set -l argv foo breaks. Fish will ignore autoload files for it, so left over eval.fish from previous fish versions won’t be loaded.
• The git prompt in informative mode now defaults to skipping counting untracked files, as this was extremely slow. To turn it on, set __fish_git_prompt_showuntrackedfiles or set the git config value “bash.showuntrackedfiles” to true explicitly (which can be done for individual repositories). The “informative+vcs” sample prompt already skipped display of untracked files, but didn’t do so in a way that skipped the computation, so it should be quite a bit faster in many cases (#8980).
• The __terlar_git_prompt function, used by the “Terlar” sample prompt, has been rebuilt as a configuration of the normal fish_git_prompt to ease maintenance, improve performance and add features (like reading per-repo git configuration). Some slight changes remain; users who absolutely must have the same behavior are encouraged to copy the old function (#9011, #7918, #8979).

Scripting improvements

• Quoted command substitution that directly follow a variable expansion (like echo "$var$(echo x)") no longer affect the variable expansion (#8849).
• Fish now correctly expands command substitutions that are preceded by an escaped dollar (like echo \\$(echo)). This regressed in version 3.4.0.
• math can now handle underscores (_) as visual separators in numbers (#8611, #8496):

math 5 + 2_123_252

• math’s min and max functions now take a variable number of arguments instead of always requiring 2 (#8644, #8646):

> math min 8,2,4
2

• read is now faster as the last process in a pipeline (#8552).
• string join gained a new --no-empty flag to skip empty arguments (#8774, #8351).
• read now only triggers the fish_read event, not the fish_prompt event (#8797). It was supposed to work this way in fish 3.2.0 and later, but both events were emitted.
• The TTY modes are no longer restored when non-interactive shells exit. This fixes wrong tty modes in pipelines with interactive commands. (#8705).
• Some functions shipped with fish printed error messages to standard output, but they now they rightly go to standard error (#8855).
• jobs now correctly reports CPU usage as a percentage, instead of as a number of clock ticks (#8919).
• process-exit events now fire when the process exits even if the job has not yet exited, fixing a regression in 3.4.1 (#8914).

Interactive improvements

• Fish now reports a special error if a command wasn’t found and there is a non-executable file by that name in PATH (#8804).
• less and other interactive commands would occasionally be stopped when run in a pipeline with fish functions; this has been fixed (#8699).
• Case-changing autosuggestions generated mid-token now correctly append only the suffix, instead of duplicating the token (#8820).
• ulimit learned a number of new options for the resource limits available on Linux, FreeBSD ande NetBSD, and returns a specific warning if the limit specified is not available on the active operating system (#8823, #8786).
• The vared command can now successfully edit variables named “tmp” or “prompt” (#8836, #8837).
• time now emits an error if used after the first command in a pipeline (#8841).
• fish_add_path now prints a message for skipped non-existent paths when using the -v flag (#8884).
• Since fish 3.2.0, pressing Control-D while a command is running would end up inserting a space into the next commandline, which has been fixed (#8871).
• A bug that caused multi-line prompts to be moved down a line when pasting or switching modes has been fixed (#3481).
• The Web-based configuration system no longer strips too many quotes in the abbreviation display (#8917, #8918).
• Fish started with --no-config will now use the default keybindings (#8493)
• When fish inherits a USER environment variable value that doesn’t correspond to the current effective user ID, it will now correct it in all cases (#8879, #8583).
• Fish sets a new EUID variable containing the current effective user id (#8866).
• history search no longer interprets the search term as an option (#8853)
• The status message when a job terminates should no longer be erased by a multiline prompt (#8817)

New or improved bindings

• The Alt-S binding will now insert doas instead of sudo if necessary (#8942).
• The kill-whole-line special input function now kills the newline preceeding the last line. This makes dd in vi-mode clear the last line properly.
• The new kill-inner-line special input function kills the line without any newlines, allowing cc in vi-mode to clear the line while preserving newlines (#8983).
• On terminals that emit special sequences for these combinations, Shift-Space is bound like Space, and Ctrl-Return is bound like Return (#8874).

Improved prompts

• A new Astronaut prompt (#8775), a multi-line prompt using plain text reminiscent of the Starship.rs prompt.

Completions

• Added completions for:
  • archlinux-java (#8911)
  • apk (#8951)
  • brightnessctl (#8758)
  • efibootmgr (#9010)
  • fastboot (#8904)
  • optimus-manager (#8913)
  • rclone (#8819)
  • sops (#8821)
  • tuned-adm (#8760)
  • wg-quick (#8687)
• complete can now be given multiple --condition options. They will be attempted in the order they were given, and only if all succeed will the completion be made available (as if they were connected with &&). This helps with caching - fish’s complete system stores the return value of each condition as long as the commandline doesn’t change, so this can reduce the number of conditions that need to be evaluated (#8536, #8967).

Improved terminal support

• Working directory reporting is enabled for kitty (#8806).
• Changing the cursor shape is now enabled by default in iTerm2 (#3696).

For distributors

• libatomic is now correctly detected as necessary when building on RISC-V (#8850, #8851).
• In some cases, the build process found the wrong libintl on macOS. This has been corrected (#5244).
• The paths for completions, functions, and configuration snippets now include subdirectories fish/vendor_completions.d, fish/vendor_functions.d, and fish/vendor_conf.d (respectively) within XDG_DATA_HOME (or ~/.local/share if not defined) (#8887, #7816).

--

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