esc2pipe

A fish plugin that types | when you press Escape.

Why

Some keyboard layouts put the pipe character behind a combination a laptop cannot produce — no dedicated key, and no AltGr position that works. If you write shell pipelines all day, reaching for it is a constant interruption.

esc2pipe rebinds a key you rarely need at a prompt to the one you need constantly.

Requirements

• fish, tested on 4.6. The plugin uses only bind and commandline, both stable across many major versions.
• The default key bindings. See Notes if you use vi mode.

Installation

With Fisher

fisher install Gren-95/esc2pipe

By hand

curl -o ~/.config/fish/conf.d/esc2pipe.fish \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Gren-95/esc2pipe/main/conf.d/esc2pipe.fish
exec fish

Anything in conf.d is sourced automatically when fish starts, so there is nothing to add to config.fish.

Usage

Press Esc at the prompt. | is inserted at the cursor:

cat access.log        # type this
                      # press Esc
cat access.log |      # you get this
cat access.log |grep 404

How it works

The whole plugin is four lines:

function insert_pipe_on_esc
    commandline -i " |"
end

bind escape insert_pipe_on_esc

commandline -i inserts text at the cursor and moves the cursor along with it.

Notes

There is no space after the pipe. The inserted string is " |" — a space before, none after. cat log |grep 404 runs exactly as cat log | grep 404 does, but if you want the second space, change the string in the function.

Escape has a short delay. fish waits fish_escape_delay_ms after an Escape to tell a real keypress from the start of an escape sequence, such as the one an arrow key sends. The default is 30 ms, so the pipe appears a beat after the key. Tune it with:

set -U fish_escape_delay_ms 20

vi mode conflicts. Under fish_vi_key_bindings, Escape leaves insert mode. This plugin claims that key, so the two fight over it. Bind something else instead:

bind ctrl-g insert_pipe_on_esc

Uninstall

fisher remove Gren-95/esc2pipe        # if installed with Fisher
rm ~/.config/fish/conf.d/esc2pipe.fish  # if installed by hand
exec fish

Bash and Zsh

Earlier versions shipped esc2pipe.sh and esc2pipe.zsh. Both were removed in March 2024. This is a fish plugin only.

Licence

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.