How To Configure Your Fish Prompt permalink

by Sarah Rogue on 09 August, 2025

first of all, i love the command shell fish!!!

but

i’m a complete noob when it comes to fish and fishing as well

however

i love the way fish is setup on CashyOS but when i switched to Fedora 42, i missed all of the epic CashyOS features that made fish even better

i felt like i had to do something — something like this:

the simple solution

does’t work

and that would be transferring my existing ~/.config/fish folder to Fedora

even transferring the CashyOS config folder doesn’t work

so what did i do?

copying and pasting, mainly

the solution that worked

is kinda involved but well worth it imho

first, let’s start with aliases

aliases

CachyOS has some good ones but i came up with a few of my own

from my ~/.config/fish/conf.d/alias.fish file:

# Replace ls with eza
alias la 'eza -a --color=always --group-directories-first --icons'  # all files and dirs
alias ll 'eza -l --color=always --group-directories-first --icons'  # long format
alias lt 'eza -aT --color=always --group-directories-first --icons' # tree listing
alias l. "eza -a | grep -e '^\.'"                                   # show only dotfiles
alias lal 'eza -al --color=always --group-directories-first --icons'
alias ls 'eza --color=always --group-directories-first --icons'

# Common use
alias psmem 'ps auxf | sort -nr -k 4'
alias psmem10 'ps auxf | sort -nr -k 4 | head -10'
alias .. 'cd ..'
alias ... 'cd ../..'
alias .... 'cd ../../..'
alias ..... 'cd ../../../..'
alias ...... 'cd ../../../../..'
alias dir 'dir --color=auto'
alias vdir 'vdir --color=auto'
alias grep 'grep --color=auto'
alias fgrep 'fgrep --color=auto'
alias egrep 'egrep --color=auto'
alias hw 'hwinfo --short'                                           # Hardware Info

# Get the error messages from journalctl
alias jctl "journalctl -p 3 -xb"

# root commands
alias dnf 'sudo dnf5'
alias reboot 'sudo reboot'
alias shutdown 'sudo systemctl poweroff'
alias systemctl 'sudo systemctl'
alias update 'sudo dnf5 --refresh update'
alias yum 'sudo dnf5'

# use vim
alias vi vim
# don't use the bash version of which
alias which 'type -P'

WARNING: be sure you have eza installed as it isn’t, by default, on Fedora 42. if you don’t, your ls command will quit working due to the alias

sudo dnf install eza

finally, let’s move onto the epic CachyOS fish prompt

main prompt

this one had me racking my small, tiny brain

but

i finally figured it out

the funced fish_prompt command lets you edit your prompt

down at the very bottom of the file, i changed it to:

if set -q VIRTUAL_ENV
    set -f venv_name (basename "$VIRTUAL_ENV")" "
else
    set -f venv_name ""
end

echo -s \n (set_color red) (prompt_pwd -d 70) (set_color brblack) (echo (fish_vcs_prompt) | sed 's/[()]//g')
echo -n -s $venv_name $normal $suffix " "

what i learned is that set -q queries to see if the variable is set or unset

and

set -f sets the variable for the scope of the function

also, in order to get the virtual environment part to work

you need to add the following line to your ~/.config/fish/conf.d/environ.fish file:

set -gx VIRTUAL_ENV_DISABLE_PROMPT true

conclusion

i learned a lot about fish and got a bunch of epic aliases for my Fedora 42 OS

you can also download my fish configuration which has everything done for you

> ~/.config/
> rm -rf fish    # unless you've already made changes
> tar Jxvf ~/Downloads/fish-config.tar.xz

thank you for reading and have a fun day!!!