Fish 4.6 released today as the newest version of this Rust-based interactive shell for Linux and other platforms.

Fish 4.6 brings better handling for the width of emoji icons, the tab completion pager now left-justifies the description of each column, set_color improvements, and a variety of other minor enhancements.

Fish 4.6 also now supports the SHELL_PROMPT_PREFIX, SHELL_PROMPT_SUFFIX, and SHELL_WELCOME environment variables. These environment variables were set by systemd beginning in 2024 and intended for automatically prepending and appending to the left prompt and also for any welcome message to display on startup after the greeting. These environment variables are used by systemd’s run0 and other software.

This systemd pull request from 2024 laid out the case for the enhancements to the shell prompts and welcome messages. Meanwhile this Fish Shell ticket since 2024 tracked the request and also has this demo screenshot of the now-implemented functionality:

On the systemd side they landed the pull back in systemd 257.

Downloads and more details on today’s Fish 4.6 release via GitHub.