fish 3.3.0 (released June 28, 2021)

Notable improvements and fixes

• fish_config gained a prompt subcommand to show and pick from the sample prompts directly in the terminal, instead of having to open a webbrowser. For example fish_config prompt choose default loads the default prompt in the current session (#7958).
• The documentation has been reorganized to be easier to understand (#7773).

Deprecations and removed features

• The $fish_history value "default" is no longer special. It used to be treated the same as "fish" (#7650).
• Redirection to standard error with the ^ character has been disabled by default. It can be turned back on using the stderr-nocaret feature flag, but will eventually be disabled completely (#7105).
• Specifying an initial tab to fish_config now only works with fish_config browse (e.g. fish_config browse variables), otherwise it would interfere with the new prompt subcommand (see below) (#7958).

Scripting improvements

• math gained new functions log2 (like the documentation claimed), max and min (#7856). math functions can be used without the parentheses (eg math sin 2 + 6), and functions have the lowest precedence in the order of operations (#7877).
• Shebang (#!) lines are no longer required within shell scripts, improving support for scripts with concatenated binary contents. If a file fails to execute and passes a (rudimentary) binary safety check, fish will re-invoke it using /bin/sh (#7802).
• Exit codes are better aligned with bash. A failed execution now reports $status of 127 if the file is not found, and 126 if it is not executable.
• echo no longer writes its output one byte at a time, improving performance and allowing use with Linux's special API files (/proc, /sys and such) (#7836).
• fish should now better handle cd on filesystems with broken stat(3) responses (#7577).
• Builtins now properly report a $status of 1 upon unsuccessful writes (#7857).
• string match with unmatched capture groups and without the --all flag now sets an empty variable instead of a variable containing the empty string. It also correctly imports the first match if multiple arguments are provided, matching the documentation. (#7938).
• fish produces more specific errors when a command in a command substitution wasn't found or is not allowed. This now prints something like "Unknown command" instead of "Unknown error while evaluating command substitution".
• fish_indent allows inline variable assignments (FOO=BAR command) to use line continuation, instead of joining them into one line (#7955).
• fish gained a --no-config option to disable configuration files. This applies to user-specific and the systemwide config.fish (typically in /etc/fish/config.fish), and configuration snippets (typically in conf.d directories). It also disables universal variables, history, and loading of functions from system or user configuration directories (#7921, #1256).
• When universal variables are unavailable for some reason, setting a universal variable now sets a global variable instead (#7921).
• $last_pid now contains the process ID of the last process in the pipeline, allowing it to be used in scripts (#5036, #5832, #7721). Previously, this value contained the process group ID, but in scripts this was the same as the running fish's process ID.
• process-exit event handlers now receive the same value as $status in all cases, instead of receiving -1 when the exit was due to a signal.
• process-exit event handlers for PID 0 also received JOB_EXIT events; this has been fixed.
• job-exit event handlers may now be created with any of the PIDs from the job. The handler is passed the last PID in the job as its second argument, instead of the process group.
• Trying to set an empty variable name with set no longer works (these variables could not be used in expansions anyway).
• fish_add_path handles an undefined PATH environment variable correctly (#8082).

Interactive improvements

• Commands entered before the previous command finishes will now be properly syntax highlighted.
• fish now automatically creates config.fish and the configuration directories in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fish (by default ~/.config/fish) if they do not already exist (#7402).
• $SHLVL is no longer incremented in non-interactive shells. This means it won't be set to values larger than 1 just because your environment happens to run some scripts in $SHELL in its startup path (#7864).
• fish no longer rings the bell when flashing the command line. The flashing should already be enough notification and the bell can be annoying (#7875).
• fish --help is more helpful if the documentation isn't installed (#7824).
• funced won't include an entry on where a function is defined, thanks to the new functions --no-details option (#7879).
• A new variable, fish_killring, containing entries from the killring, is now available (#7445).
• fish --private prints a note on private mode on startup even if $fish_greeting is an empty list (#7974).
• fish no longer attempts to lock history or universal variable files on remote filesystems, including NFS and Samba mounts. In rare cases, updates to these files may be dropped if separate fish instances modify them simultaneously. (#7968).
• wait and on-process-exit work correctly with jobs that have already exited (#7210).
• __fish_print_help (used for --help output for fish's builtins) now respects the LESS environment variable, and if not set, uses better default pager settings (#7997).
• Errors from alias are now printed to standard error, matching other builtins and functions (#7925).
• ls output is colorized on OpenBSD if colorls utility is installed (#8035)
• The default pager color looks better in terminals with light backgrounds (#3412).
• Further robustness improvements to the bash history import (#7874).
• fish now tries to find a Unicode-aware locale for encoding (LC_CTYPE) if started without any locale information, improving the display of emoji and other non-ASCII text on misconfigured systems (#8031). To allow a C locale, set the variable fish_allow_singlebyte_locale to 1.
• The Web-based configuration and documentation now feature a dark mode if the browser requests it (#8043).
• Color variables can now also be given like --background red and -b red, not just --background=red (#8053).
• exit run within fish_prompt now exits properly (#8033).
• When attempting to execute the unsupported POSIX-style brace command group ({ ... }) fish will suggest its equivalent begin; ...; end commands (#6415).

New or improved bindings

• Pasting in Vi mode puts text in the right place in normal mode (#7847).
• Vi mode's u is bound to undo instead of history-search-backward, following GNU readline's behavior. Similarly, Control-R is bound to redo instead of history-search-backward, following Vim (#7908).
• s in Vi visual mode now does the same thing as c (#8039).
• The binding for "\*y now uses fish_clipboard_copy, allowing it to support more than just xsel.
• The Control-Space binding can be correctly customised (#7922).
• exit works correctly in bindings (#7967).
• The F1 binding, which opens the manual page for the current command, now works around a bug in certain less versions that fail to clear the screen (#7863).
• The binding for Alt-S now toggles whether sudo is prepended, even when it took the commandline from history instead of only adding it.
• The new functions fish_commandline_prepend and fish_commandline_append allow toggling the presence of a prefix/suffix on the current commandline. (#7905).
• backward-kill-path-component Control-W) no longer erases parts of two tokens when the cursor is positioned immediately after /. (#6258).

Improved prompts

• The default Vi mode prompt now uses foreground instead of background colors, making it less obtrusive (#7880).
• Performance of the "informative" git prompt is improved somewhat (#7871). This is still slower than the non-informative version by its very nature. In particular it is IO-bound, so it will be very slow on slow disks or network mounts.
• The sample prompts were updated. Some duplicated prompts, like the various classic variants, or less useful ones, like the "justadollar" prompt were removed, some prompts were cleaned up, and in some cases renamed. A new "simple" and "disco" prompt were added (#7884, #7897, #7930). The new prompts will only take effect when selected and existing installed prompts will remain unchanged.
• A new prompt_login helper function to describe the kind of "login" (user, host and chroot status) for use in prompts. This replaces the old "debian chroot" prompt and has been added to the default and terlar prompts (#7932).
• The Web-based configuration's prompt picker now shows and installs right prompts (#7930).
• The git prompt now has the same symbol order in normal and "informative" mode, and it's customizable via $__fish_git_prompt_status_order (#7926).

Completions

• Added completions for:
  • firewall-cmd (#7900)
  • sv (#8069)
• Improvements to plenty of completions!
• Commands that wrap cd (using complete --wraps cd) get the same completions as cd (#4693).
• The --force-files option to complete works for bare arguments, not just options (#7920).
• Completion descriptions for functions don't include the function definition, making them more concise (#7911).
• The kill completions no longer error on MSYS2 (#8046).
• Completion scripts are now loaded when calling a command via a relative path (like ./git) (#6001, #7992).
• When there are multiple completion candidates, fish inserts their shared prefix. This prefix was computed in a case-insensitive way, resulting in wrong case in the completion pager. This was fixed by only inserting prefixes with matching case (#7744).

Improved terminal support

• fish no longer tries to detect a missing new line during startup, preventing an erroneous ⏎ from appearing if the terminal is resized at the wrong time, which can happen in tiling window managers (#7893).
• fish behaves better when it disagrees with the terminal on the width of characters. In particular, staircase effects with right prompts should be gone in most cases (#8011).
• If the prompt takes up the entire line, the last character should no longer be chopped off in certain terminals (#8002).
• fish's reflow handling has been disabled by default for kitty (#7961).
• The default prompt no longer produces errors when used with a dumb terminal (#7904).
• Terminal size variables are updated for window size change signal handlers (SIGWINCH).
• Pasting within a multi-line command using a terminal that supports bracketed paste works correctly, instead of producing an error (#7782).
• set_color produces an error when used with invalid arguments, rather than empty output which interacts badly with Cartesian product expansion.

For distributors

• fish runs correctly on platforms without the O_CLOEXEC flag for open(2) (#8023).

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Download links: To download the source code for fish, use the file named "fish-3.3.0.tar.xz". The file downloaded from "Source code (tar.gz)" has extra build requirements. The SHA-256 sum of this file is a4215e4cab2a5b101b0b8843720bda3c7eb98e8a14dca0950b8ef17e94282faa. A GPG signature from David Adam (key ID 0x7A67D962D88A709A) is available as "fish-3.3.0.tar.xz.asc".