helpwith.fish

My computer is missing so many man pages, sometimes I feel --help | less

There are a lot of things that fish does better than bash, but one thing that neither does very well is the help command. Depending on whether you need help with a function, a built-in, an executable file, or something else entirely, you need to use a different command, be it help, type, whatis, which, or something else. And then it still differs depending on whether you'd like a short summary or the full information.

helpwith.fish provides a universal help command for the fish shell. Running helpwith <command> will give you the following output:

<command> is </path/to/bin | a function | an alias | ...>
<command> - <short description>
Show <man page | help page | definition>? [Enter/[q]uit]

You can also get straight to viewing the definition of any function with the -d/--definition flag.

Installation

cd ~/.config/fish/functions
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidhusz/helpwith.fish/main/helpwith.fish

And if, like me, you feel like typing eight letters to call this function is simply asking too much:

echo 'abbr --add h helpwith' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Uninstallation

rm ~/.config/fish/functions/helpwith.fish
test -d ~/.cache/helpwith.fish && rm -r ~/.cache/helpwith.fish

The command summaries at the beginning of man pages are cached, hence the cache directory.