You may have heard of Fish. It’s a replacement shell for Bash and has a lot of features going for it. For starters, it can go through and anticipate what you’re typing and auto-complete it. It also comes with sensible defaults, syntax highlighting out of the box, and many, many other features.
Introducing Fisherman and The Fishery. The former is a tool that users can install on their system to interact with the latter: The Fishery, a plugin repository for Fish Shell. It’s a fairly new project with not many plugins, but the ones that are available are cool.
So, how do you use Fisherman and The Fishery with Fish Shell?
Installation
Before you can interact with The Fishery, you’ll need to first install “The Fisherman.” Open up a terminal window, and enter the command below.
curl -sL install.fisherman.sh | fish
The command is a quick process. Once installed, close your terminal and re-open it.
Installing Plugins with Fisher
Plugins can be installed fairly easily. Say you want to search for a plugin. Just type this in the fish shell:
fisher search
This will list all available plugins. Admittedly, there really aren’t many plugins for fish that will jump right out at you – that is, unless you’re a developer. It’s clear that The Fishery is targeting developers who love to use Fish as their command shell.
When you see a plugin you’d like to install (via search), it’s as simple as entering fisher install pluginname. Want to remove a plugin? Type fisher uninstall pluginname.
Besides just installing and uninstalling plugins, it’s also possible to update Fisherman itself. This can all be accomplished simply by typing fisher update. Once entered, the software will go out and download the latest version of itself.
2 Fish Plugins to Check Out on The Fishery
1. Bass
If you’re using fish shell, you’ve no doubt noticed that some bash commands written in scripts that you run simply just don’t work. This can be annoying, as Fish and Bash do things a bit differently. Not to worry, there’s a plugin for that.
Just install Bass, and use it with Fish. It’ll make using Bash and Fish together much, much easier.
2. Spin
Sometimes when you enter a command in a shell, you’re not exactly sure if it’s running or not. Often it’ll look as if your shell is stuck, and you cant type. To fix this problem, install the Spin plugin!
With this plugin installed, every time a command is entered, you’ll get a customizable spinner that will go off until the command has finished running.
Conclusion
Even with tools like Fisherman and resources like The Fishery, the likelihood of users switching to Fish is unknown. Bash is still the default on many Linux installations, and that doesn’t look like it’ll be changing any time soon.
Still, for those that are on Fish and love it, these tools couldn’t do anything other than make the experience even more interesting. Go check them out yourself!
Do you use Fish Shell? If so, do you like the idea of using plugins? Tell us below!
Subscribe to our newsletter!
Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox
Sign up for all newsletters.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy. We will not share your data and you can unsubscribe at any time. Subscribe
Derrik Diener
Derrik Diener is a freelance technology blogger.
Comments are closed