I had heard good things about fish and after using oh-my-zsh for a long time, I wanted to give it a try with Starship.

Installing fish and Starship is straightforward on macOS:

brew install fish starship

Next, we add fish as an allowed non-standard shell on macOS, and set it as the default:

echo /usr/local/bin/fish | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish

I was using Alacritty and for Alacritty to pick up the new shell, I had to restart my laptop (or at least log out and back in).

My migration from oh-my-zsh with powerlevel10k was easy. Most features were supported out of the box or easy to configure:

• starship init fish | source to initialize Starship, with many of the command line features that oh-my-zsh and powerlevel10k provide
• A custom key binding for my tmux sessionizer
• zoxide init fish to initialize zoxide (z command replacement for cd)
• fzf --fish to initialize fzf for reverse history search; alternatively there is fzf.fish, a fish plugin using the fisher plugin manager

You can find my full configuration in my dotfiles repository.

Compared with Zsh, fish provides:

• Built-in auto-suggestions based on history
• Built-in, real-time syntax highlighting
• Better built-in tab completion

I also wanted to migrate my Zsh command history, here are some options, but haven’t tried them yet:

• pip install zsh-history-to-fish and then run: zsh-history-to-fish
• https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin (SQLite database that works across Zsh and fish)

Links

• https://github.com/mloning/dotfiles (my dotfiles)
• https://github.com/nc7s/fish (interesting fish config)