A few days ago, we discussed how to install Fish shell, a robust, fully-usable shell that ships with many cool features out of the box such as auto-suggestions, built-in search functionality, syntax highlighting, web based configuration and a lot more. Today, we are going to discuss how to make our Fish shell beautiful and elegant using Oh My Fish (shortly omf). It is a Fishshell framework that allows you to install packages which extend or modify the look and feel of your shell. It is easy to use, fast and extensible. Using omf, you can easily install themes that enriches the look of your shell and install plugins to tweak your fish shell as per your wish.

Install Oh My Fish

Installing omf is not a big deal. All you have to do is just run the following command in your fish shell.

curl -L https://get.oh-my.fish | fish

Once the installation has completed, you will see the the prompt has automatically changed as shown in the above picture. Also, you will notice that the current time on the right side of the shell window.

Alternatively, you can download the installer and customize your install:

curl -L https://get.oh-my.fish > install

fish install --path=~/.local/share/omf --config=~/.config/omf

You can verify the integrity of the downloaded installer by verifying the script against this checksum:

06844ca6876fac0ea949c8089d8c5f71e14b69d2bb1dc41f1d0677250a1c62e1 install

That's it. Let us go ahead and tweak our fish shell.

Now, Let Us Make Our Fish Shell Beautiful

To list all installed packages, run:

omf list

This command will display both the installed themes and plugins. Please note that a package can be either a theme or plugin. Installing packages means installing themes or plugins.

All official and community supported packages (both plugins and themes) are hosted in the main Omf repository. In this repository, you can see a whole bunch of repositories that contains a lot of plugins and themes.

Now let us see the list of available and installed themes. To do so, run:

omf theme

As you can see, we have only one installed theme, which is default, and a whole bunch of available themes. You can preview all available themes here before installing it. This page contains all theme details, features, a sample screenshot of each theme and which theme is suitable for whom.

Installing a new theme

Allow me to install a theme, for example clearance theme - a minimalist fish shell theme for people who use git a lot. To do so, run:

omf install clearance

As you see in the above picture, the look of fish prompt has changed immediately after installing the new theme.

Let me browse through the file system and see how it looks like.

Not bad! It is really simple theme. It distinguishes the current working directory, folders and files with different color. As you may notice, it also displays the current working directory on top of the prompt. Currently, clearance is my default theme.

Changing theme

Like I already said, the theme will be applied immediately after installing it. If you have more than one themes, you can switch to a different theme using the following command:

omf theme <theme-name>

Example:

omf theme agnoster

Now I am using "agnoster" theme. Here is how agnoster theme changed the look of my shell.

Installing Plugins

For instance, I am going to install the weather plugin. To do so, just run:

omf install weather

The weather plugin depends on jq. So, you might need to install jq as well. It is mostly available in the default repositories of any Linux distro. So, you can install it using the default package manager. For example, the following command will install jq in Arch Linux and its variants.

sudo pacman -S jq

Now, check your weather from your fish shell using command:

weather

Searching packages

To search for a theme or plugin, do:

omf search <search_string>

Example:

omf search nvm

To limit the search to themes, use -t flag.

omf search -t chain

This command will only search for themes that contains the string "chain".

To limit the search to plugins, use -p flag.

omf search -p emacs

Updating packages

To update only the core (omf itself), run:

omf update omf

If it is up-to-date, you would see the following output:

Oh My Fish is up to date. You are now using Oh My Fish version 6. Updating https://github.com/oh-my-fish/packages-main master... Done!

To update all packages:

omf update

To selectively update packages, just include the packages names as shown below.

omf update clearance agnoster

Displaying information about a package

When you want to know the information about a theme or plugin, use this command:

omf describe clearance

This command will show the information about the given package.

Package: clearance Description: A minimalist fish shell theme for people who use git Repository: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/theme-clearance Maintainer:

Removing packages

To remove a package, for example emacs, run:

omf remove emacs

Managing Repositories

By default, the official repository is added automatically when you install Oh My Fish. This repository contains all packages built by the developers. To manage user-installed package repositories, use this command:

omf repositories [list|add|remove]

To list installed repositories, run:

omf repositories list

To add a repository:

omf repositories add <URL>

Example:

omf repositories add https://github.com/ostechnix/theme-sk

To remove a repository:

omf repositories remove <repository-name>

Troubleshooting Oh My Fish

Omf is smart enough to guide you to fix things on your own if something went wrong. It will list what to do to fix an issue. For example, I removed and installed clearance package and got file conflicting error. Luckily, Oh My Fish instructed me what to do before continuing. So, I simply ran the following to know how to fix the error:

omf doctor

And fixed the issued the error by running the following command:

rm ~/.config/fish/functions/fish_prompt.fish

Whenever you ran into a problem, just run 'omf doctor' command and try all suggested workarounds.

Getting help

To display help section, run:

omf -h

Or,

omf --help

Uninstalling Oh My Fish

To uninstall Oh My Fish, run this command:

omf destroy

Go ahead and start customizing your fish shell. For more details, refer the project's GitHub page.

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