re-use '~/.profile` for Fish?

Question

(I'm talking about the shell Fish, esp. Fish's Fish.)

For Bash/ZSH, I had ~/.profile with some exports, aliases and other stuff.

I don't want to have a separate config for environment variables for Fish, I want to re-use my ~/.profile. How?

In The FAQ, it is stated that I can at least import those via /usr/local/share/fish/tools/import_bash_settings.py, however I don't really like running that for each Fish-instance.

Solution 1

You can use bash to parse /etc/profile and ~/.profile, and then start fish.

1. Create /usr/local/bin/fishlogin with contents

    #!/bin/bash -l
    exec -l fish "$@"
   

2. Make it executable

    sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/fishlogin
   

3. Check that it works by running fishlogin and checking that you end up in a Fish shell. Press Control+D to exit the Fish shell.

4. Add it to /etc/shells

    echo /usr/local/bin/fishlogin | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
   

5. Set it as your default shell.

   Under Linux:

    sudo usermod -s /usr/local/bin/fishlogin $USER
   

   Under macOS:

    chsh -s /usr/local/fishlogin $USER
   

Solution 2

For a much cleaner solution, you can use the foreign env plugin:

fenv source ~/.profile

Solution 3

My current solution (see here for a maybe more recent version):

egrep "^export " ~/.profile | while read e
    set var (echo $e | sed -E "s/^export ([A-Z_]+)=(.*)\$/\1/")
    set value (echo $e | sed -E "s/^export ([A-Z_]+)=(.*)\$/\2/")

    # remove surrounding quotes if existing
    set value (echo $value | sed -E "s/^\"(.*)\"\$/\1/")

    if test $var = "PATH"
        # replace ":" by spaces. this is how PATH looks for Fish
        set value (echo $value | sed -E "s/:/ /g")

        # use eval because we need to expand the value
        eval set -xg $var $value

        continue
    end

    # evaluate variables. we can use eval because we most likely just used "$var"
    set value (eval echo $value)

    set -xg $var $value
end

Solution 4

I tried sourcing .profile on fish startup and it worked like a charm for me.

just do :

echo 'source ~/.profile;clear;' >  ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Restart terminal or iterm2, test an alias from .profile to test.

Note : Won't work with more complex .profile files that use syntax not available in fish - credit @erb

Solution 5

You can use bass, a plugin to execute bash commands in fish.

1. Install bass.

   $ git clone https://github.com/edc/bass.git
   $ cd bass
   $ make install
   

2. And then, just put this in your config.fish:

   bass source ~/.profile
   

View more solutions

Comments

[Albert]

I don't want to fully execute .profile. I just want to get all exports from there. One easy way would be to egrep "^export" which would be good enough already for me. Another, more correct solution would be this. Also, I e.g. could run this import_bash_settings.py script which probably does something similar. So, there are obviously many ways to do this. With my question here, I was wondering how others have solved this.

[Alexar]

Worked for me too! Running MacOSX.

[erb]

Won't work with more complex .profile files that use syntax not available in fish.

[Eswar Rajesh Pinapala]

@erb I agree with you, I added the caveat in the answer.

[max pleaner]

can you explain what this does?

[yonix]

So elegant! Should be the accepted answer IMO

[gloriphobia]

Just in case anyone is wondering, the mac equivalent of usermod -s /usr/local/bin/fishlogin $USER is chsh -s /usr/local/fishlogin $USER

[electronix384128]

If you get chsh: /usr/local/bin/fishlogin: non-standard shell need to add it to /etc/shells

[jhrmnn]

To fully imitate launching fish directly, fish "$@" should be replaced with exec -l fish "$@". exec replaces the bash process with fish, while -l causes that argv[0] for fish is -fish, which signals that this is a login shell.

[Jules Sam. Randolph]

This should be the accepted solution. You could elaborate (install omf)

[Sz.]

Usually no big deal, but this seems to have the drawback that whenever a subshell is implicitly created, an unnecessary bash instance will also always be launched first. (Note: ~/.profile is only relevant for login shells.) Still upvoted, though, for its good trade-off between simplicity and hackyness. (I'd personally still rather just tweak my shell config scripts a bit, as I've long given up having complicated ones, in favor of custom shell-independent methods.)

[Noé Rubinstein]

@Sz. Well, nope. Fish does not support subshells in the first place. And even if it did, it would not do so by executing your login shell, so no Bash would be spawned then.

[Jared Smith]

@maxpleaner AFAICT it looks through .profile for export statements and executes them as fish sets. It's kinda hacky, but clever.

[Albert]

Note that fish reorders and modifies the entries in $PATH, which you might find confusing. See here.

[ggnoredo]

this is awesome thank you

[Wayne Werner]

Probably don't even need to install dash - just sh will do (which is probably dash)

[mk12]

If you're going to use this method, make sure it isn't too slow. I personally started to notice that my shell startup delay was annoyingly long, and tracked it down to bass.

[rsalmei]

@mk12 probably it isn't bass' fault, it is your .profile that has too much going on.

[mk12]

@rsalmei All I had in there was environment variable and alias definitions, with a few if statements. It causes no noticeable delay in bash. So I think it is bass's fault. On the other hand, I'm much happier with the fenv plugin. It's written in shell rather than Python and seems much faster for me.

[rsalmei]

Yeah @mk12, it seems to be nice, but also way more limited, as it only captures environment variables. bass on the other hand interprets any bash shell script, and make them run in fish. It certainly will have a bit more overhead, but totally negligible in my experience, but your mileage may vary.

[Dominykas Mostauskis]

@JulesRandolph installation of Oh My Fish is not required. The foreign_env fish plugin can be installed alone, it doesn't have dependencies.

[RomanKousta]

This just broke my Iterm2 on Mac. Followed the exact steps, now I can't even open iTerms.

[RomanKousta]

If following this answer bricks anyone else's iTerm2, here's how to recover: in iTerm2, "Profile" -> "General", make sure the "Command" is set to "Command" and enter "/bin/sh" as the command (or /bin/bash). Cmd+N open a new shell, then chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish. Then undo the beginning steps and change "Command" back to Login Shell.

[RomanKousta]

This doesn't handle aliases, which make up 80% of my .bash_profile, and is therefore useless to me.

[Noé Rubinstein]

@AsyncMoksha I'm curious to know how it managed to break. Maybe you could try running fishlogin from your current shell and see if it prints any interesting error message?

[Dominykas Mostauskis]

~/.profile gets sourced twice, because --login (or -l) is used twice, once on bash and once on exec. Remove one of the -l flags.

[Noé Rubinstein]

As far as I can tell, the exec builtin does not read .profile; all the option does is add a '-' to the start of the first element of argv.

[Timo Kluck]

If anyone's interested, here's an addition that also gets the .bashrc's aliases: ` #!/bin/bash -i if [ -d "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR" ]; then alias > "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"/.bash_aliases fi exec -l fish --init-command 'source $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/.bash_aliases' "$@" `

[Admin]

You can add @jgillich solution in your .config/fish/config.fish file ``` if status is-interactive fenv source ~/.profile end ``` That way .profile will always be synced with fish :)