I think path is one of the best things about Fish. Here's a simple function to get the canonical name of the folder something is in.
function folder
if ! isatty stdin
cat - | read -at argv
end
for file in $argv
echo (path resolve $file | path dirname | string split '/')[-1]
end
end
Use it like this:
folder file.ext
echo file | folder
folder */*.*
folder .