Fisher 4.0 has been released and incorporates most of Scuba's features. This project is archived for now.

Scuba

🤿 Scuba - It's how you swim with the fish

Scuba is the fastest, smallest, and fishiest plugin manager for the friendly interactive shell.

• Oh My Fish and Fisher plugin support
• Blazingly fast concurrent plugin downloads
• Minimal and elegant, following fish design philosophy
• 100% pure fish; easy to contribute to or modify

Bootstrap Scuba

curl -sL https://git.io/scuba-install | source && _scuba_sub_install ilancosman/scuba

Quickstart

Installing plugins

The install command installs plugins from their repository paths on GitHub.

scuba install patrickf3139/fzf.fish

To get a specific version of a plugin add an @ symbol after the plugin name followed by a tag, branch, or commit.

scuba install jorgebucaran/nvm.fish@1.1.0

You can install plugins from local directories as well.

scuba install ~/path/to/plugin

Listing plugins

The list command lists installed plugins.

$ scuba list
ilancosman/scuba
patrickf3139/fzf.fish
jorgebucaran/nvm.fish@1.1.0
/home/ilan/path/to/plugin

ilancosman/scuba is listed because you installed it to start with!

list also accepts a regular expression to filter the output.

$ scuba list '^/'
/home/ilan/path/to/plugin

Updating plugins

The update command fetches and installs the latest version of plugins.

scuba update patrickf3139/fzf.fish

scuba update by itself will update all installed plugins, including Scuba.

Removing plugins

The remove command removes installed plugins.

scuba remove patrickf3139/fzf.fish

Since Scuba is just like any other plugin, you can uninstall it using scuba remove ilancosman/scuba.

Creating a Plugin

See the plugin creation guide for documentation.

Contributing

From the smallest typo to the largest feature, contributions of any size or experience level are welcome!

If you're interested in helping contribute to Scuba, please take a look at the Contributing Guide.

Oh My Fish and Fisher plugin support

In general anywhere you see fisher add, you can replace it with scuba install. The only minor issue may be uninstall.fish since Scuba uses an event system instead of storing the plugin in a permenant directory on your machine. Thus, plugins that rely on uninstall.fish to remove leftover variables will not do so. Fisher 4.0, coming out sometime in 2021, will also remove uninstall.fish support. All plugins should transition to the uninstall event system that Scuba and Fisher use.

Comparison with Fisher

Scuba is highly inspired by Fisher and operates similarly. What are the advantages and disadvantages? What's simply different?

TLDR: Scuba is similar to the proposed fisher 4.0 but faster, simpler, better maintained, and more in line with fish design philosophy. Unlike Fisher, Scuba does not support file-based configuration or dependencies.

Advantages

• Faster - Since Scuba is pure fish, it is significantly faster than Fisher. However, both are quick in absolute terms.

• Simpler - Scuba is less than half of Fisher's SLOC. Scuba is pure fish while Fisher is roughly 15% awk and sed. Scuba has an organized file structure while Fisher puts everything in one file.

• Better maintained - Fisher has had a little over 30 commits in the last year and a half. Multiple important issues have sat for a year or longer without resolution. Fisher 4.0, meant to fix these issues, was proposed on Jul 31 2020. However, the maintainer has said that he can probably begin work sometime in 2021. Scuba was created with the express intention of being better maintained and already solves all of Fisher's longstanding issues.

• More elegant - Scuba follows fish's design philosophy.

  • The law of orthogonality - Scuba does more with less. It has no need for self-update or self-uninstall commands like Fisher. Instead, Scuba is merely another Scuba plugin, bootstrapping itself.
  • The law of responsiveness - Scuba downloads plugins concurrently so as to use as little time as possible.
  • Configurability is the root of all evil - Scuba offers no configuration of any kind. Fisher allows users to manage their plugins using files or from the CLI, and also to choose their installation path.
  • The law of discoverability - Scuba, unlike Fisher, uses the same commands as nearly all package managers, making it immediately familiar to most users.

Disadvantages

• Scuba does not support dependencies. While this might initially seem like a major flaw, the empirical evidence suggests otherwise: 0 of the 24 most popular plugins/prompts listed on awesome.fish have dependencies. Nevertheless, this can be counted as a minor disadvantage.

• Scuba does not support installing from websites other than GitHub. This may be added if requested.

Differences

• Commands vs. File-based configuration - Scuba does not offer two separate approaches for managing plugins. Instead, everything is done via commands.

• No non-useful bells and whistles

  • No cache fallback - Fisher offers a cache fallback for installed plugins. However, caching doesn't make much sense when downloading and installing a plugin takes under a second. Caching requires that Fisher create permanent directories on your machine. It has also been the source of multiple bugs.
  • No installing plugins from private git servers. Fisher 4.0 is also slated to remove this feature.

Acknowledgements

• Fisher - Inspired much of Scuba's documentation and design.