Fish 4.2 Released: Multi-line Command Suggestions and Major Quality-of-Life Upgrades

The Fish shell (Friendly Interactive Shell), a popular and powerful alternative to Bash and Zsh, has just rolled out version 4.2.0, bringing a host of improvements focused on interactivity and usability. The headline feature is a significant enhancement to its signature auto-suggestion capability.

The Big Feature: Multi-line Command Suggestion

For developers and sysadmins who frequently use continuation characters (\) or line breaks to organize complex or chained commands, this update is a massive time-saver.

Fish will now automatically suggest and complete multi-line commands directly from your command history as you type.

Previously, suggestions were limited to single-line entries. By intelligently recognizing and suggesting complex, multi-line entries, Fish dramatically improves the speed and ease of repeating sophisticated tasks, making long scripts and complicated pipeline execution a breeze.

Key Improvements in Fish 4.2.0

Beyond the multi-line suggestion, this release includes several other notable fixes and interactive enhancements:

• Prompt Management: Fish now hides multi-line prompt sections that scroll out of view. This resolves an issue where the shell would draw duplicate lines when repainting the screen, resulting in a much cleaner terminal experience.
• Terminal Titles: A new function, fish_tab_title, is available. This allows users to set the title of the terminal tab separately from the main terminal window title, offering better organization for users working with multiple shell sessions.
• Mouse Capture Fixes: Fish no longer forces the disabling of mouse capture. This means you can now utilize terminal tools that allow you to click on a character within the terminal window to reposition the edit cursor.
• Unicode Consistency: Fish 4.2.0 now defaults to assuming UTF-8 character encoding universally, even on systems using a different locale. This ensures consistent character representation across different operating systems, terminals, and desktop environments.
• Konsole Workaround: KDE Konsole users receive an MSYS2-specific fix to prevent the shell from using the wrong working directory when opening new tabs.

Getting the New Release

The source code for Fish 4.2.0 is available on GitHub.

• Ubuntu Users: You can easily install or upgrade using the official Fish PPA, which packages the latest release for supported LTS versions (e.g., Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, and later):``` sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-4 sudo apt install fish

• Other Distributions: Packages are available through the openSUSE Build Service.
• macOS Users: Find install instructions on the official Fish shell website.

This release confirms Fish’s dedication to providing the most user-friendly and intelligent command-line experience available.