The user-friendly Unix shell Fish has arrived in version 4.9, ironing out several everyday annoyances at the terminal. After the initial 4.9.0 release on 3 September 2026, the developers shipped the follow-up fixes 4.9.1 and 4.9.2 within two days, the latter on 5 September. Fish is known as a shell that works out of the box, scoring points with autosuggestions, syntax highlighting and helpful completions.
Less friction in interactive use
In the KDE terminal Konsole, the kitty keyboard protocol had been breaking scrolling; Fish 4.9.0 disables the protocol there by default, though it can be re-enabled via a feature flag. Tab completion is now noticeably faster in directories with slow symlinks. On terminals such as kitty, the Space and Shift+Space keys can also be mapped independently.
- Abbreviations now show their description in the completion pager.
- Nested list indexing such as
$foo[$bar[1] 2]is now allowed. - Vi mode restores the
cFandcTcommands.
Two keyboard follow-ups
Version 4.9.1 cleared up three input problems: on non-default keyboard layouts Fish triggered bindings for the physical key rather than the mapped one, Space acceptance during IME input misbehaved, and on macOS the option key now once again inserts characters such as @ on German layouts instead of firing a keybinding. Version 4.9.2 then fixed a resulting macOS keyboard-handling regression. Anyone running Fish should update straight to 4.9.2.
Sources: fishshell.com – Release Notes · Linuxiac
