How many Fish scripts distributed via Homebrew ?
What is Fish ? 🔗
The fish (Friendly Interactive SHell) shell is a command-line interface for Unix-like operating systems designed with a focus on user-friendliness, interactivity, and usability. Unlike traditional shells that prioritize strict POSIX compliance or complex configuration, fish aims to be feature-rich “out of the box”, offering modern conveniences like syntax highlighting and autosuggestions by default.
Key Features 🔗
- Autosuggestions: As you type, fish suggests commands based on your history and available files, often completing commands in grey text which you can accept with a single keystroke.
- Syntax Highlighting: Commands are colored in real-time to indicate validity. Valid commands appear in one color, while invalid ones or typos appear in red, providing immediate visual feedback.
- Web-Based Configuration: Fish includes a browser-based configuration tool, allowing users to customize prompt colors and settings graphically without editing text files manually.
- No Subshells: Unlike other shells, fish avoids implicit subshells for loops and functions, ensuring variable changes always propagate to the main shell.
Scripting Differences 🔗
Fish uses a syntax that differs significantly from POSIX-compliant shells like Bash. It simplifies scripting by avoiding special syntax for variables and flow control, aiming for cleaner, more readable code.
| Feature | Bash (Standard) | Fish Shell |
|---|---|---|
| Variable Assignment | VAR=value | set VAR value |
| Command Substitution | $(command) | (command) |
| Logic Operators | &&, || | ; and, ; or |
| Conditionals | if [ condition ]; then ... fi | if test condition; ... end |
Why Use Fish? 🔗
Users often choose fish for its “batteries included” philosophy, meaning it requires minimal setup to achieve a highly productive environment compared to Zsh or Bash, which often need extensive plugin management. It also features robust tab completion that generates suggestions by parsing installed man pages, making it easier to discover command options.
However, because its scripting language is not POSIX-compliant, scripts written for sh or bash will not run directly in fish; they must be executed by their respective interpreters (e.g., bash script.sh) or rewritten in fish syntax.
Statistics of fish scripting language 🔗
On December 16th 2025, The number of CLI apps written in fish and distributed via Homebrew Core Formulae is 5 apps.
You may like to compare its count with other competitor scripting languages such as Bash and Zsh .
Apps written in fish and distributed via Homebrew Core Formulae 🔗
- fish-lsp : LSP implementation for the fish shell language
- fisher : Plugin manager for the Fish shell
- virtualfish : Python virtual environment manager for the fish shell
- babelfish : Translate bash scripts to fish
- chruby-fish : Thin wrapper around chruby to make it work with the Fish shell
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