Dependency Catalog

fish-deps manages these tools. Run fish-deps to check status, fish-deps install to install missing Required/Recommended ones, or add --optional, --terminals, or --all to also include the Optional and/or Terminal Emulators tiers.

Required

Recommended

Optional

Terminal Emulators

Integrations

Install Methods

Required

Tool	Description
fish	Fish shell >= 4.0
fzf	Fuzzy finder; >= 0.48 for its key bindings (fzf-update installs the latest)

Recommended

Tool	Description
cargo	Rust toolchain (via rustup); used by fish-deps to install Rust-based tools and to build fish from source. All paths are gated on type -q cargo and degrade gracefully. Building needs a C compiler to link; fish-deps offers to install one (build-essential, base-devel or gcc) the first time it is needed.
starship	Cross-shell prompt; loaded via type -q starship guard. Without it the Catppuccin nim-style fallback prompt activates.
uv	Python package and project manager (Astral); used by the fish-from-source build path in fish-deps, which has it run the build with Sphinx so fish’s man pages are rendered. Any system Python 3 works; uv downloads one itself only when the system has none. All consumers degrade gracefully without it.
direnv	Per-directory environment loading; integration is fully guarded with type -q direnv. Without it the direnv hook is simply not loaded and auto-venv activates normally.
paru	AUR helper (Arch only; preferred); guarded throughout — non-Arch systems silently skip AUR-specific paths. fish-deps neither offers it nor reports it as missing unless os-release identifies an Arch-based system.
yay	AUR helper (Arch only; fallback to paru); same guards apply.
eza	Modern ls replacement
zoxide	Smart cd with frecency
lsd	ls replacement (fallback to eza)
bat	Syntax-highlighted cat
ov	Modern pager (replaces less); also backs the logs viewer. Not a Rust crate, despite the name collision with an unrelated ov crate on crates.io. Prefers go install github.com/noborus/ov@latest when go is available (always gets the latest release, and covers distros like Debian/Ubuntu that don’t package ov in their base repos); falls back to the system PM (AUR on Arch) otherwise. When the system PM has no ov and Go is missing, fish-deps offers to install Go first and then runs go install; a system package method the PM’s index does not carry is left out rather than offered only to fail.
ripgrep	Fast line search
trash	Safe delete (trash-cli); backs the rm and scrub wrappers.
python3	Standalone interpreter — used by the paru/yay log cleaner. Note: uv does not provide python3 on PATH, and Arch’s base does not include it, so it is listed separately. All consumers degrade gracefully without it.

Optional

Single-purpose tools that back one wrapper function (or less) and only matter if you already use that specific tool. Skipped by fish-deps install/sync unless you pass --optional.

Tool	Description
btop	Modern resource monitor; backs the top wrapper (falls back to system top).
dust	Disk usage tree (Rust); one of two backends for the du wrapper (falls back to system du).
duf	Disk usage/free overview; the other backend for the du wrapper (falls back to system du).
prettyping	Colorized ping wrapper; backs the ping wrapper (falls back to system ping).
go	Go toolchain; only used to install ov via go install (see below), which gets the latest release and doesn’t depend on your distro packaging ov. fish-deps maps the package name per distro (go on Arch/Homebrew, golang-go on Debian/Ubuntu, golang on Fedora) and offers to install Go itself when ov needs it, even though this entry is in the Optional tier. A distro’s Go may be older than ov asks for; from Go 1.21 on, it then fetches the newer toolchain it needs by itself.
lazygit	Terminal git UI; only referenced by the lg abbreviation.
lazydocker	Terminal docker UI; backs the ld wrapper.
docker	Container runtime; gates the Docker context indicator in the right prompt and backs the ld wrapper. Both consumers are guarded with type -q docker and degrade gracefully without it. Installing the daemon package does not enable/start the service — do that yourself if you want it running.
yt-dlp	Video/media downloader; backs the yt-dlp wrapper function. The wrapper falls back to the system yt-dlp and the rest of the config works without it.
screen	GNU screen; fallback backend for jobrunner when tmux is unavailable.
marktext	Markdown editor; backs the md wrapper, which is the only thing that references it. No distro packages it under a common name, so fish-deps offers the AUR package (marktext-bin) on Arch and otherwise installs upstream’s AppImage to ~/.local/bin/marktext.
firejail	Sandbox; needed only by md --read-only, which uses it to make MarkText unable to save over the file it opened. Every other md invocation works without it.
win32yank.exe	Clipboard bridge for WSL2; backs the y/p/hist clipboard fallback chain when neither wl-copy/wl-paste nor xclip are present. fish-deps only offers to install it when WSL2 is detected (microsoft in /proc/sys/kernel/osrelease), downloading the pinned, checksum-verified x86_64 release from GitHub to ~/.local/bin.

Terminal Emulators

GPU-accelerated terminal emulators. Only one is ever relevant to a given user — the one matching $TERM — so neither is installed by default. Skipped by fish-deps install/sync unless you pass --terminals (or --all).

Tool	Description
kitty	GPU-accelerated terminal; unlocks kitty-specific abbreviations and --hyperlink-format=kitty in the rg wrapper when $TERM = xterm-kitty.
wezterm	GPU-accelerated terminal; unlocks WezTerm-specific abbreviations when it’s the active terminal.

Integrations

Opt-in third-party services that require their own account/setup.

Tool	Description
wakatime	Developer time tracking
tailscale	Mesh VPN client

Install Methods

The install priority for each tool:

Method	Packages
cargo	Rust tools (eza, lsd, bat, dust, ripgrep, trashy, zoxide, starship) — always gets the latest crate version, built with --locked
go install	ov — preferred over the system PM when go is available; always gets the latest release
system PM	paru / apt / brew / dnf / etc. — for tools without a crate or go install path
git clone	fzf — installed from GitHub to ~/.fzf/
curl	starship installer, fisher bootstrap, uv installer

Every cargo install passes --locked, so a crate is built against the dependency versions it was published with. Without it, cargo ignores the crate’s lockfile and takes the newest compatible release of everything; that is what made eza fail to compile against a newer palette.

Build prerequisites are not catalog entries. fish-deps offers them on demand, once a method you chose needs them, and remembers the answer for the rest of the run:

Need	Used for	Packages
C compiler (cc)	linking every cargo install	build-essential (apt), base-devel (pacman), gcc (dnf, yum, zypper)
Rust toolchain	cargo being a bare rustup shim	rustup default stable
unzip	the wakatime-cli release zip	unzip
Go	go install of ov	golang-go (apt), golang (dnf, yum), go (others)

unzip is deliberately not a catalog tier: one integration’s download needs it, and a dependency that shows up in every fish-deps report for that is noise. _fish_deps_wakatime_binary says plainly when it is missing.

Installer scripts (rustup, uv, starship, lazydocker) are downloaded to a temporary file and run only after the download succeeds; they are never streamed into sh. Downloaded binaries (wakatime-cli, win32yank.exe, the MarkText AppImage) are checked against a SHA-256 digest before they are made executable: the release’s published checksum file for wakatime-cli, the digest GitHub records for the MarkText asset, and a pinned digest for win32yank.exe, whose upstream publishes none. A failed download or checksum mismatch aborts that install and reports failure.

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