_(1)

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay so bestie, welcome to _ (yes literally just an underscore, she's that icon) — the fish-shell manual page for calling fish's translations 💅✨

This is the fish-shell page, section 1 of the manual, and we're gonna get you fluent in it fr fr 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

_ STRING

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

_ translates its arguments into the current language, if possible. That's it, that's the whole vibe 🦋

⚠️ Important caveat, no cap: this only works with messages which are translated as part of fish's own sources. So using it as part of your own fish scripts which are not upstreamed into the fish repo will not work unless the exact same message also exists upstream. 😭 Like, she only knows the lines from her own show.

It requires fish to be built with gettext support. If that support is disabled or there is no translation, it will just echo the argument back — no drama, no error, she just repeats what you said 🙈

The language depends on the current locale, set with LANG, LC_MESSAGES, LC_ALL, and LANGUAGE. Bestie, these variables do not have to be exported for fish to use them, and fish's variable scopes are supported. 💖 But — if other programs launched via fish should respect these locale variables, they have to be exported to make them available outside of fish. iykyk 🌈

For LANGUAGE you can use a list, or use colons to separate multiple languages. Obsessed with the flexibility honestly 👑

If the status language command was used, its arguments specify the language precedence, and the environment variables are ignored. She said "I make the rules now" 💅

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• _ — takes no options. Zero. None. She's lowkey minimal like that 🎀

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

💜 Use German translations:

> set LANG de_DE.UTF-8
> _ file
Datei

🦋 Specify a precedence of languages (only works with LANGUAGE):

> set LANGUAGE pt de
> _ file  # This message has a Portuguese translation.
arquivo
> _ "Invalid arguments"  # This message does not have a Portuguese translation, but a German one.
Ungültige Argumente
> _ untranslatable  # No translation in Portuguese, nor in German.
untranslatable

📌 Note: the specific examples may change if translations are added/modified. So don't come for her if Datei becomes something else later, she's doing her best 😭

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🌸 Copyright 🌸

fish-shell developers 👑

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that's the whole page bestie, go forth and translate slayfully 💖✨🎀🦋💅

this iconic little manual page is from fish-shell version 4.9, dated Sep 08, 2026 — mwah, see you next page 🫶