Fish (Unix shell)
user-friendly interactive Unix shell
fish (friendly interactive shell; stylized in lowercase) is a Unix-like shell with a focus on interactivity and usability. fish is designed to be feature-rich by default, rather than highly configurable, and does not adhere to POSIX shell standards by design.
Features
fish displays incremental suggestions as the user types, based on command history and the current directory. This functions similarly to Bash's Ctrl+R history search, but is always on, giving the user continuous feedback while typing commands. fish also includes feature-rich tab completion, with support for expanding file paths (with wildcards and brace expansion), environment variables, and command-specific completions. Command-specific completions, including options with descriptions, can be to some extent generated from the commands' man pages, but custom completions can also be included with software or written by users of the shell.
The creator of fish preferred to add new features as commands rather than syntax. This made features more discoverable, as the built-in features allow searching commands with options and help texts. Functions can also include human readable descriptions. A special help command gives access to all the fish documentation in the user's web browser.
“Fish (Unix shell)” enters the record as user-friendly interactive Unix shell. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fish, Unix and shell can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q307263. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fish (Unix shell)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.