Significant Changes

• A new string builtin to handle… strings (#2296)
• After seeing an escape character wait up to 300ms for an additional character. This is consistent with readline (e.g. bash) and can be configured via the fish_escape_delay_ms variable. This allows using escape as the Meta modifier. (#1356)
• Add new directories for vendor functions and configuration snippets (#2498)

Backward-incompatible changes

• Unmatched globs will now cause an error, except when used with for, set or count (#2719, #2394)
• and and or will now bind to the closest if or while, allowing compound conditions without begin and end (#1428)
• set -ql now searches up to function scope for variables (#2502)
• status -f will now behave the same when run as the main script or using source (#2643)
• source no longer puts the file name in $argv if no arguments are given (#139)
• History files are stored under the XDG_DATA_HOME hierarchy, and existing history will be moved on first use (#744).

Other notable fixes and improvements

• Fish no longer silences errors in config.fish (#2702)
• Move the history file to $XDG_DATA_HOME/fish (or ~/.local/share if it has not been set)
• Directory autosuggestions will now descend as far as possible if there is only one child directory (#2531)
• Add support for bright colors (#1464)
• Allow Ctrl-J (\cj) to be bound separately from Ctrl-M (\cm) (#217)
• psub now has a "-s"/"–suffix" option to name the temporary file with that suffix
• Enable 24-bit colors on select terminals (#2495)
• Support for SVN status in the prompt (#2582)
• Mercurial and SVN support have been added to the Classic + Git (now Classic + VCS) prompt (via the new __fish_vcs_prompt function) (#2592)
• export now handles variables with a "=" in the value (#2403)
• New completions for:
• alsactl
• Archlinux's asp, makepkg
• Atom's apm (#2390)
• entr - the "Event Notify Test Runner" (#2265)
• Fedora's dnf (#2638)
• OSX diskutil (#2738)
• pkgng (#2395)
• pulseaudio's pacmd and pactl
• rust's rustc and cargo (#2409)
• sysctl (#2214)
• systemd's machinectl (#2158), busctl (#2144), systemd-nspawn, systemd-analyze, localectl, timedatectl
• and more
• Fish no longer has a function called sgrep, freeing it for user customization (#2245)
• A rewrite of the completions for cd, fixing a few bugs (#2299, #2300, #562)
• Linux VTs now run in a simplified mode to avoid issues (#2311)
• The vi-bindings now inherit from the emacs bindings
• Fish will also execute fish_user_key_bindings when in vi-mode
• funced will now also check $VISUAL (#2268)
• A new suspend function (#2269)
• Subcommand completion now works better with split /usr (#2141)
• The command-not-found-handler can now be overridden by defining a function called __fish_command_not_found_handler in config.fish (#2331)
• A few fixes to the Sorin theme
• PWD shortening in the prompt can now be configured via the fish_prompt_pwd_dir_length variable, set to the length per path component (#2473)
• fish now ships a skeleton file for /etc/fish/config.fish that only contains some documentation, the included code has been moved to the corresponding file in /usr (#2799)

The SHA-1 sum for the release tarball is ecdd64fb72dfe4b46d628040ccce0e3dbca6b672.