Is it possible to disable the & ampersand character in fish shell? (make escaping with \& unnecessary)

Question

So it is possible to permanently disable the functionality of ?, making \? unnecessary, by enabling the qmark-noglob feature flag.

I would like to do the same thing for &, as I never use it for what it is supposed to do, but reasonably often work with urls that include it.

There is probably no flag for that (as that is not behavior where fish differs from bash), but maybe you know how that could be done. (I tried setting an alias, but that doesn't work)

Basically I want to save myself having to escape the & by typing \& all the time. Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Fish does not have an option to disable this. The reason there is currently an option to disable ? is because the ? glob is deprecated and will be entirely removed in future. There's no such plan for &.

What you can do is add a binding that inserts \& when you press &. Something like

bind \& 'commandline -i "\&"'

Of course this means you'd have to figure out how to insert an actual & if you do want to use it.