Reuse .bash_profile for Fish in Mac

Question

I'm using iTerm on my Mac and I have a .bash_profile that I have been comfortably using. I recently got to know about fish bash and I installed it on my Mac and all of a sudden my .bash_profile is not being sourced. Any ideas as to why I could not see it?

How could I instruct my iTerm and fish to source my .bach_profile like it was doing before without fish?

Answer 1

Fish has exactly one user controlled config file which is named $HOME/.config/fish/config.fish by default. Fish also has an export command for compatibility with bash/zsh/sh but it just a thin wrapper around the fish form:

set -gx VAR value

As for bash aliases you have two choices: turn them into abbreviations (see the "abbr" command) or functions. In fish you can define a function with its "alias" command but that simply turns

alias myalias some_command --arg1 --arg2

into

function myalias; some_command --arg1 --arg2 $argv; end

As Glenn Jackman pointed "fish is not bash". It is not an improved bash. Switching to fish isn't hard but does require a little effort. I made the switch 13 months ago and think it is worth the effort.

Answer 2

You can use this script by overtrue: [gist link]

It basically parses .bash_profile and sets the same environment variables in Fish.
Works great for me!

# Fish shell

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

    #echo "set -xg '$var' '$value' (via '$e')"
    set -xg $var $value
end