Fish, a popular user-friendly command-line shell, has announced version 4.4, a new release that builds on the 4.0 series.
One notable change is the deprecation of the default fossil prompt, which is now disabled. Interactive behavior has also been refined in several areas.
The bind builtin now lists mappings from all modes when --mode is not specified, making keybinding inspection more predictable. Fish no longer displays line-wise autosuggestions that do not begin with a command, reducing visual noise during input.
Moreover, the built-in history command now assumes that the configured pager supports ANSI color sequences, improving readability in common setups. On macOS, fish now clears the terminal’s FLUSHO flag when taking control of the terminal, fixing an issue triggered by Ctrl+O.
Vi mode receives the most visible improvements. Word movement commands (w, W, e, E) are now largely aligned with Vim’s behavior, with underscores intentionally treated as word separators. Fish Shell 4.4 also introduces a set of new special input functions to support these movements and related text-object operations.
In addition, Vi mode key bindings now support counts for movement and deletion commands, enabling familiar workflows such as d3w or 3l via a new operator mode.
Visual customization is expanded with the addition of new Catppuccin-based color themes, while terminal feature support improves through enhancements to set_color, which now supports a strikethrough modifier.
As always, the release includes fixes for several regressions, including a crash when autosuggesting Unicode characters with complex lowercase mappings and a prompt rendering glitch affecting read --prompt-str "".
For more information, see the announcement.
