[netvl]

#159 kind of works with the `string collect` mechanism, although it is indeed not very obvious, compared to bash:

    set file_contents (cat filename | string collect -N)

I understand that this is purely anecdotal, but I'm using fish for quite a long time, I've written a lot of tooling for myself in fish, and I agree that sometimes there are some things which are annoyingly missing from fish (like this multiline variable thing), but I would not say it makes fish significantly less powerful. And these things are sometimes fixed, too.