Slow autocomplete in fish-shell on macOS Big Sur

devops
Author

Martin Proks

Published

January 4, 2021

UPDATE: Upgrading to fish >3 solves the issues now.

If you have decided to upgrade to the latest macOS Big Sur 10.14.6, you might have experienced an issue with slow autocomplete in fish-shell.

Due to change to read-only permissions for whatis 1 the man pages can’t be updated for /usr/share/man. Therefore, the fish is switching to using apropos 2.

How to fix without updating?

# create backup
cp /usr/local/share/fish/functions/__fish_describe_command.fish \
   /usr/local/share/fish/functions/__fish_describe_command.fish.old

# Taken from: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/6270#issuecomment-548515306
echo "function __fish_describe_command; end" > /usr/local/share/fish/functions/__fish_describe_command.fish

Thank you fish community for such a quick solution 3.

Footnotes

  1. https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/6270↩︎

  2. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/374025/errors-from-whatis-command-unable-to-rebuild-database-with-makewhatis↩︎

  3. https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/7365↩︎