Teaching an old dog to Fish

Andrew J Todd esq. — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 14:38:47 GMT

Inspired by the recent furore around Shellshock I decided that it was time to try an alternative to bash By the very grown up process of shutting my eyes and poking my finger at the results of a search for "shell" I ended up at fish shell, described by the project as "a command line shell for the 90s". I'm presuming that this means the 1990s and is not a minimum age requirement.

I'm quite enjoying it so far but the missing piece for me was something equivalent to the very useful virtualenvwrapper. Luckily for me someone else has already had this problem and wrote virtual fish. For which many thanks. I did have a little trouble with installation and configuration. I'm sure that this was entirely my own fault but as a reminder for me and anyone else who stumbles on this here is what I did.

Downloaded virtual.fish from the Github repo to ~/bin
Because I don't use ~/.virtualenvs to store my virtual environments I added set -x VIRTUALFISH_HOME ~/Work/envs/ to my .config/fish/fish.config file
Included the currently active virtual environment name in my prompt by following the instructions. A trap for young players is to make sure that you do funcsave fish_prompt as instructed. I missed this out the first couple of times and kept wondering why my prompt was wrong.

Update: Thanks for the comments. bronsen - yes I do source virtual.fish in my config.fish. Or at least I did until jl pointed me at Pew. Now I've switched to that from virtualenvwrapper and virtual.fish and I must say that it works like a dream. Thanks both for taking the time to leave a comment.

Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion (Posts about fish)

Teaching an old dog to Fish