Implicitly-universal variables have some downsides:
- It's surprising that "set fish_color_normal ..."
and "set fish_key_bindings fish_vi_key_bindings" propagate to other
shells and persist, especially since all other variables (and other
shells) would use the global scope.
- they don't play well with tracking configuration in Git.
- we don't know how to roll out updates to the default theme (which is
problematic since can look bad depending on terminal background
color scheme).
It's sort of possible to use only globals and unset universal variables
(because fish only sets them at first startup), but that requires
knowledge of fish internals; I don't think many people do that.
So:
- Set all color variables that are not already set as globals.
- To enable this do the following, once, after upgrading:
copy any existing universal color variables to globals, and:
- if existing universal color variables exactly match
the previous default theme, and pretend they didn't exist.
- else migrate the universals to ~/.config/fish/conf.d/fish_frozen_theme.fish,
which is a less surprising way of persisting this.
- either way, delete all universals to do the right thing for most users.
- Make sure that webconfig's "Set Theme" continues to:
- instantly update all running shells
- This is achieved by a new universal variable (but only for
notifying shells, so this doesn't actually need to be persisted).
In future, we could use any other IPC mechanism such as "kill -SIGUSR1"
or if we go for a new feature, "varsave" or "set --broadcast", see
https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/7317#issuecomment-701165897https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/8455#discussion_r757837137.
- persist the theme updates, completely overriding any previous theme.
Use the same "fish_frozen_theme.fish" snippet as for migration (see above).
It's not meant to be edited directly. If people want flexibility
the should delete it.
It could be a universal variable instead of a conf snippet file;
but I figured that the separate file looks nicer
(we can have better comments etc.)
- Ask the terminal whether it's using dark or light mode, and use an
optimized default. Add dark/light variants to themes,
and the "unknown" variant for the default theme.
Other themes don't need the "unknown" variant;
webconfig already has a background color in context,
and CLI can require the user to specify variant explicitly if
terminal doesn't advertise colors.
- Every variable that is set as part of fish's default behavior
gets a "--label=default" tacked onto it.
This is to allow our fish_terminal_color_theme event handler to
know which variables it is allowed to update. It's also necessary
until we revert 7e3fac561d (Query terminal only just before reading
from it, 2025-09-25) because since commit, we need to wait until
the first reader_push() to get query results. By this time, the
user's config.fish may already have set variables.
If the user sets variables via either webconfig, "fish_config theme
{choose,save}", or directly via "set fish_color_...", they'd almost
always remove this label.
- For consistency, make default fish_key_bindings global
(note that, for better or worse, fish_add_path still remains as
one place that implicitly sets universal variables, but it's not
something we inject by default)
- Have "fish_config theme choose" and webconfig equivalents reset
all color variables. This makes much more sense than keeping a
hardcoded subset of "known colors"; and now that we don't really
expect to be deleting universals this way, it's actually possible
to make this change without much fear.
Should have split this into two commits (the changelog entries are
intertwined though).
Closes#11580Closes#11435Closes#7317
Ref: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/12096#issuecomment-3632065704
No need to define "cmd-foo" anchors; use :doc:`foo <cmds/foo>`
instead. If we want "cmd-foo" but it should be tested.
See also 38b24c2325 (docs: Use :doc: role when linking to commands,
2022-09-23).
This makes it so we link to the very top of the document instead of a
special anchor we manually include.
So clicking e.g. :doc:`string <cmds/string>` will link you to
cmds/string.html instead of cmds/string.html#cmd-string.
I would love to have a way to say "this document from the root of the
document path", but that doesn't appear to work, I tried
`/cmds/string`.
So we'll just have to use cmds/string in normal documents and plain
`string` from other commands.
Recent synopsis changes move from literal code blocks to
[RST line blocks]. This does not translate well to HTML: it's not
rendered in monospace, so aligment is lost. Additionally, we don't
get syntax highlighting in HTML, which adds differences to our code
samples which are highlighted.
We hard-wrap synopsis lines (like code blocks). To align continuation
lines in manpages we need [backslashes in weird places]. Combined with
the **, *, and `` markup, it's a bit hard to get the alignment right.
Fix these by moving synopsis sources back to code blocks and compute
HTML syntax highlighting and manpage markup with a custom Sphinx
extension.
The new Pygments lexer can tokenize a synopsis and assign the various
highlighting roles, which closely matches fish's syntax highlighing:
- command/keyword (dark blue)
- parameter (light blue)
- operator like and/or/not/&&/|| (cyan)
- grammar metacharacter (black)
For manpage output, we don't project the fish syntax highlighting
but follow the markup convention in GNU's man(1):
bold text type exactly as shown.
italic text replace with appropriate argument.
To make it easy to separate these two automatically, formalize that
(italic) placeholders must be uppercase; while all lowercase text is
interpreted literally (so rendered bold).
This makes manpages more consistent, see string-join(1) and and(1).
Implementation notes:
Since we want manpage formatting but Sphinx's Pygments highlighing
plugin does not support manpage output, add our custom "synopsis"
directive. This directive parses differently when manpage output is
specified. This means that the HTML and manpage build processes must
not share a cache, because the parsed doctrees are cached. Work around
this by using separate cache locations for build targets "sphinx-docs"
(which creates HTML) and "sphinx-manpages". A better solution would
be to only override Sphinx's ManualPageBuilder but that would take a
bit more code (ideally we could override ManualPageWriter but Sphinx
4.3.2 doesn't really support that).
---
Alternative solution: stick with line blocks but use roles like
:command: or :option: (or custom ones). While this would make it
possible to produce HTML that is consistent with code blocks (by adding
a bit of CSS), the source would look uglier and is harder to maintain.
(Let's say we want to add custom formatting to the [|] metacharacters
in HTML. This is much easier with the proposed patch.)
---
[RST line blocks]: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#line-blocks
[backslashes in weird places]: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/8626#discussion_r782837750
The default hg prompt is slow on large repositories (hg status takes
2-3 seconds on mozilla-central) which is unacceptable as a default.
Mimick our git prompt: by default, only show the current branch.
If the new variable $fish_prompt_hg_show_informative_status is set,
then use the old behavior.
[ci skip]
