I am migrating from ksh to fish. I am finding that I miss the ability to define an associative array, hash table, dictionary, or whatever you wish to call it. Some cases can be simulated as in
set dictionary$key $valueeval echo '$'dictionary$key
But this approach is heavily limited; for example, $key may contain only letters, numbers, and underscores.
I understand that the fish approach is to find an external command when one is available, but I am a little reluctant to store key-value information in the filesystem, even in /run/user/<uid>, because that limits me to "universal" scope.
How do fish programmers work around the lack of a key-value store? Is there some simple approach that I am just missing?
Here's an example of the sort of problem I would like to solve: I would like to modify the fish_prompt function so that certain directories print not using prompt_pwd but using special abbreviations. I could certainly do this with a switch command, but I would much rather have a universal dictionary so I can just look up a directory and see if it has an abbreviation. Then I could change the abbreviations using set instead of having to edit a function.