I am unable to get fish to work on my laptop...dunno why, all I get is a "the fish protocol died unexpectedly" message.

I had a similar problem some time ago and posted for help. Someone replied with a post that went something like
"fish is a cludge. use XXX instead". The XXX was some other protocol which was used just like the fish command and it worked fine....but I don't remember what it was. I know I made a note of it somewhere!

I have googled & searched & I can't find the post.

Does anyone know what it might have been?

Alternatively, can anyone help troubleshoot fish?

Both computers are Debian, and I am able to make the connect with ssh.

The program Filezilla is crossplatform and works pretty well.

Have you tried gnas which is short for gnu flash?

I think you want sftp then

Bingo! That's what it is...works like a charm.

Thank you very much.

If you have the fuse kernel module loaded and the sshfs package installed, it is very easy to mount a remote directory as a regular user:

sshfs <mount_point>

Then you can use any file manager or copy files back and forth in the console as if the directory were local.