Installation

This configuration requires Fish 4.x or newer; check with fish --version. A distro-packaged Fish 3.x is too old. The Fish Version Requirement section of the Troubleshooting chapter lists upgrade steps by distribution, and fish-deps reports an outdated Fish.

This configuration is managed as a git repository. To deploy on a new machine:

mv ~/.config/fish ~/.config/fish.bak   # back up any existing config
git clone https://git.rootiest.dev/rootiest/fish-config.git ~/.config/fish

Then open a new Fish shell. Fisher installs automatically on first launch and the Catppuccin Mocha theme is applied. All other plugin functionality is bundled directly with this config and requires no additional installation.

Installing the Tools

The shell itself needs nothing more, but much of what makes it useful is a set of external tools: starship, fzf, zoxide, eza, bat, ripgrep and others. Every one degrades gracefully when absent, and fish-deps installs them for you. From the first shell:

fish-deps            # report what is installed and what is missing
fish-deps install    # install what is missing, one prompt per tool

fish-deps install walks the Dependency Catalog and, for each missing tool, asks Install <tool>? [Y/n/q]. Enter or y installs it, n skips that tool, and q (or Ctrl+C, or Ctrl+D) stops the whole run, so nothing further is offered. When a tool can be installed more than one way, it lists the methods and lets you pick; Enter takes the first, which is the preferred one. Nothing is installed without your answer, and sudo asks for its own password where the system package manager needs it.

Beyond the individual installs it takes care of the things a fresh server tends to lack, but only when a method you chose needs them:

A C compiler (build-essential, base-devel or gcc), before any Rust tool is built with cargo.
A default Rust toolchain, when cargo is only a rustup shim.
unzip, before the wakatime-cli download.
Go, before installing ov on a distro that does not package it.

Newly installed tools are put on the current shell’s PATH right away, so there is no restart between steps; fish itself is the exception, and needs a new shell once it has been upgraded. The Optional and Terminal Emulator tiers are skipped unless you add --optional, --terminals or --all.

OS Compatibility

This is a Linux-only configuration. It is developed and tested on an Arch Linux system; fish-deps also detects apt, dnf, zypper, and yum for broader distro support, but coverage outside Arch is thinner.

Clipboard access (y, p, hist) is the exception: it falls back through wl-copy/wl-paste (Wayland), xclip (X11), and win32yank.exe (WSL2), so it works on all three. There is still no pbcopy/pbpaste fallback for macOS.

macOS is not supported. _fish_deps_detect_pm does check for brew, but that alone does not make the functions above work — they have no macOS equivalent path today.

Windows is not supported. Fish itself has no native Windows build; upstream’s own “Windows” install docs are Cygwin/WSL workarounds, not a real port. This config is not tested under WSL either. WSL2 runs a real Linux kernel and can run systemd, so basic shell use may work; zramctl, sbctl, and Secure Boot state are still meaningless inside a VM, but clipboard integration works via win32yank.exe (see above) once it’s installed on the Windows side and reachable through WSL interop.

Assumed present on any Linux system this runs on: git, gpg, tar, and GNU coreutils (for stat, date, numfmt). These are not tracked by fish-deps — see the Dependency Catalog — because they are base-system utilities, not opt-in software with an install journey to manage. A system missing any of them is missing basic Linux tooling, not a fish-deps gap.

Return Sentinel

config.fish ends with a return sentinel guard. Any lines appended after it by a tool’s setup command (starship init fish | source, zoxide init fish | source, etc.) will have no effect. All integrations are managed via conf.d/ files.

If a new tool’s shell integration appears to do nothing, check whether its setup command appended an init line below the sentinel and create a dedicated conf.d/<tool>.fish instead.

Updating

Pull the latest changes from the upstream repository without needing a configured git remote:

config-update — Fetch and apply the latest commits from upstream
config-update --dry-run — Preview available changes without applying them
config-update --force — Stash local changes, pull, then restore the stash

All git output is suppressed. Run exec fish after a successful update to reload.