Rust-based fish shell has just released a new version, landing a catch of improvement sure to reel in (I’m sorry) those seeking out a bash alternative.
Fish 4.2.0 (go on; go leave the obvious comment) nets a couple of minor-ish new features — it’s already a capable shell — with the big one being that fish will now auto-suggest multi-line commands from your command history as you type.
Those of you who routinely run commands making use of line breaks or continuation characters to chain actions (or just prettify input so it’s easily readable) this is likely to be a major quality-of-life gain.
The full-skinnyFish is Bash, but Better – heck, a LOT Better!
Plus, fish now hides multiline prompt sections th…
Rust-based fish shell has just released a new version, landing a catch of improvement sure to reel in (I’m sorry) those seeking out a bash alternative.
Fish 4.2.0 (go on; go leave the obvious comment) nets a couple of minor-ish new features — it’s already a capable shell — with the big one being that fish will now auto-suggest multi-line commands from your command history as you type.
Those of you who routinely run commands making use of line breaks or continuation characters to chain actions (or just prettify input so it’s easily readable) this is likely to be a major quality-of-life gain.
The full-skinnyFish is Bash, but Better – heck, a LOT Better!
Plus, fish now hides multiline prompt sections that scroll out of view, in an effort to avoid duplicate lines when it repaints the screen.
The fish_tab_title function can now be used to set the title of the terminal tab separately from the window title, if required.
KDE users using Konsole will appreciate the addition of a MSYS2-specific workaround to avoid using ‘the wrong working directory when opening new tabs’.
Beyond that, fish no longer force-disables mouse capture. This means you can now use tools that let you click on a character to move the edit cursor.
Fish 4.2.0 now assumes UTF-8 character encoding, even on systems that use a different locale.
It also stops converting Unicode characters to ASCII equivalents on systems without multi-byte locale support. This will mean character representation in Fish is consistent across different OSes, terminals and desktop environments.
Translation updates, distro packaging adjustments and a batch of bug and regressions fixes round out this release. Among fixes reeled in: working SPARC and MIPS Linux builds; errors with man resolved for certain commands; and fewer resize glitches on VTE-based terminals.
Where to Get Fish 4.2.0
You can download the source code for fish from GitHub (among other places). Users on macOS and can find install details on the official website, while packages for a host of Linux distros are available from the openSUSE Build Service
Ubuntu users can make use of the official fish PPA to install or upgrade to the latest release. This PPA packages the latest version of fish for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, 24.04 and 25.10 only (plus any distributions based on those, e.g., Linux Mint, Zorin OS):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-4
sudo apt install fish
Don’t want to use an external package and don’t require the latest features? You can install it from the Ubuntu repos, but only Ubuntu 25.04 and later provides the new Rust-based (4.x) series.