How to set up fish shell in WSL 2

Let's talk about why fish. Why not use zsh?

• Smart and user-friendly
• powerful features such as syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and tab completions that simply work out of the box.
• No need to learn works without configuration (beginner-friendly).

First, we need to install fish using the command:

# This will install fish and its dependencies.
sudo apt install fish

Now we need to set fish-shell as our default shell.

copy this command at the end of the line.

# This will tell us the path of fish binary
# Copy it in the clipboard
which fish

# Use command sudo chsh -s <paste path of fish shell> <your username>
# Just like:
sudo chsh -s /usr/bin/fish username

Note: Restart your terminal and see if it works.

Now we have fish as our default shell.

---

I previously stated that configuration is optional. Nonetheless, I will show you how to configure it so that we have a less-boring shell.

How to inherit the system-wide environment variables on startup, from bash?

Using the package bass we can solve just that. First, we need to install a plugin manager in Fish called Fisher from git.io/fisher.

# This will install fisher plugin manager for us.
curl -sL https://git.io/fisher | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher

After installing we can now:

# this will update fisher as well as the plugins installed.
fisher update

Next, we will install bass from https://github.com/edc/bass. To do this we just use Fisher like this:

fisher install edc/bass

To use bass we can configure fish like so:

🖊️ Copy the command in .config/fish/config.fish

# Inherit system-wide environment variables.
bass source /etc/profile

That completes the configuration.

Other notable plugins we can use:

# Autopair brackets & qoutes. 
fisher install jorgebucaran/autopair.fish

# Jump to folder easily.
fisher install jethrokuan/z

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How to style fish using the starship cross-shell prompt?

Finally, we have come to the last part of this tutorial.

Have you noticed how attractive my shell is in comparison to yours? That's because I'm using a Starship preset. This will be quick, so follow me again.

To install it we use:

# This will install the latest package in your local bin directory. 
curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh -s -- --bin-dir ~/.local/bin/

Next, we need to initialize it using our shell.

# Add this to your fish config.
starship init fish | source

Setting up the preset from starship.rs

# Copy this command and we are good to go.
starship preset pastel-powerline > ~/.config/starship.toml

• Additional plugin for fisher

fisher install jorgebucaran/nvm.fish

👏 Excellent job!

Note: Restart your terminal to make sure all changes take effect.

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