Installation and Setup

Installing

1. Make sure you are running Fish 3.1+. If you are running an Ubuntu LTS release that has an older Fish version, install Fish via the Fish 3.x release series PPA.

2. The recommended way to install VirtualFish is to first install Pipx and then run:

   pipx install virtualfish
   pipx ensurepath
   

   Alternatively, you can first install uv and then run:

   uv tool install virtualfish
   uv tool update-shell
   

   Yet another option is to use Pip:

   python -m pip install --user virtualfish
   fish_add_path (python3 -c "import site; print(site.USER_BASE)")/bin
   

3. Install the VirtualFish loader by running:

   vf install
   

   If you want to use VirtualFish with plugins, list the names of the plugins as arguments to the install command:

   vf install compat_aliases projects environment
   

   Note: After performing the above step, you will be prompted to run exec fish in order to make these changes active in your current shell session.

4. Customize your fish_prompt as described below.

Customizing Your fish_prompt

VirtualFish doesn’t attempt to mess with your prompt. Since Fish’s prompt is a function, it is both much less straightforward to change it automatically, and much more convenient to simply customize it manually to your liking.

The easiest way to add the active virtual environment’s name to your prompt is to type funced fish_prompt and add the following line somewhere:

if set -q VIRTUAL_ENV
    echo -n -s (set_color -b blue white) "(" (basename "$VIRTUAL_ENV") ")" (set_color normal) " "
end

Then, type funcsave fish_prompt to save your new prompt to disk.

Un-installing

To un-install VirtualFish, run:

vf uninstall
python -m pip uninstall virtualfish