This is a cheat sheet for configuring fish shell with the tide prompt on Linux.

prerequisites.

A word of caution: If you happen to run Ubuntu, its version of fish can be quite outdated to the point that tide won’t work with it.
-Install/Update fish shell to the latest by adding the ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-3

sudo apt update

sudo apt install fish

(If you find another distro with an outdated version of fish, let me know and I’ll update this page.)

running fish

/usr/bin/fish

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

Install ‘fisher’

The fish shell has its own plugin manager called ‘fisher’.
We will need fisher to install the tide prompt plugin.

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jorgebucaran/fisher/main/functions/fisher.fish | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher

sudo pacman -Sy fisher

install the tide prompt

fisher install IlanCosman/tide@v6

run the configuration script

tide has it’s own built-in configuration script that will get you most of the way there, most of the time:

tide configure

If you’re happy with the results, congrats, you’re done!

color customization

context

“context” is the configuration name given to the part of the prompt that displays user@hostname. In a default tide config it is shown on the right-side prompt.

set -U tide_context_always_display true

set -U tide_context_color_default white

set -U tide_context_color_root CE2029

set -U tide_context_color_ssh yellow

set -U tide_context_bg_color black

pwd

“pwd” stands for “print working directory” This is where we show the current working directory in the prompt. By default, it’s shown on the left-side.

We can change the background color of the pwd section by setting two universal environment variables:

set -U tide_pwd_bg_color yellow

set -U tide_pwd_color yellow

We can set the foreground colors of the parent directories with:

set -U tide_pwd_color_dirs 000000

We can set the foreground colors of the active working directory with:

set -U tide_pwd_color_anchors brwhite

With these settings you get something like /etc/systemd/system