Viewing This Manual
There are four ways to read this manual.
The documentation website
Section titled “The documentation website”help config --htmlOpens https://fish-config-docs.pages.dev/ in the default browser — the
Starlight-powered site built from docs/manual/** on every push to main.
It has a section sidebar and full-text search. Deep links to a specific
section aren’t supported from the command line; once the site opens, use
its search box to jump straight to what you need.
As a man page
Section titled “As a man page”help config --manhelp config pkg --manOpens the compiled docs/fish-config.1 directly via man -l, bypassing the pager fallback chain. If a section keyword is given, the pager opens at the nearest matching heading. The symlink is created once on first run (like an install step) and MANPATH is set each session, enabling the standard invocation:
man fish-configNOTE: fish-config (hyphen) is this config’s man page. fish_config (underscore) is fish’s built-in browser-based configuration tool — a completely separate command. Do not mix them up.
In the terminal
Section titled “In the terminal”help confighelp config keybindingsWithout a pager available beyond the basics, help config [SECTION] opens
the Markdown manual in the best available viewer, falling back through:
1. ov + bat section navigation + syntax highlighting (best)2. ov alone section navigation, raw Markdown3. bat alone syntax highlighting, use / to search4. man -l pre-compiled man page (if available)5. less plain text with line-jump6. cat plain outputWith ov, the Markdown renders with syntax highlighting and section-based navigation:
Space next section^ previous sectionAlt+u toggle section list sidebar/ search forwardn / N next / previous search matchg go to line numberj interactive jump target (line, %, or 'section')q quitIf SECTION is given, the pager opens at the first heading that matches the
keyword (case-insensitive; checks docs/fish-config.index aliases first,
then falls back to a normalized heading scan):
help config keybindingshelp config abbreviationshelp config pkghelp config logshelp config fish-depsReading the source directly
Section titled “Reading the source directly”docs/manual/** is the single source of truth this manual, the man page,
and the website are all generated from. Numbered files and directories
correspond to the numbered sections in this manual — browse them in any
editor, or from a shell:
cd ~/.config/fish/docs/manualgrep -rn "keybindings" .Section 5 is the exception. Function entries are generated from the
man-page-style comment header above each function in functions/*.fish,
so the documentation for a command lives beside the code that implements
it and cannot drift from it. To read the source for a single function, or
to correct its documentation, open the function itself:
functions/git-clean.fishThe files under docs/manual/05-functions/ carry only the category
titles, ordering, and search keywords.