Extend fish PATH

$PATH is an environment variable containing the directories that fish searches for commands. Unlike other shells, $PATH is a list, not a colon-delimited string.

To prepend /usr/local/bin and /usr/sbin to $PATH, you can write:

set PATH /usr/local/bin /usr/sbin $PATH

To remove /usr/local/bin from $PATH, you can write:

set PATH (string match -v /usr/local/bin $PATH)

For compatibility with other shells and external commands, $PATH is a path variable, and so will be joined with colons (not spaces) when you quote it:

echo "$PATH"
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin

and it will be exported like that, and when fish starts it splits the $PATH it receives into a list on colon.

You can do so directly in config.fish, like you might do in other shells with .profile. See this example:

A faster way is to modify the $fish_user_paths universal variable, which is automatically prepended to $PATH. For example, to permanently add /usr/local/bin to your $PATH, you could write:

set -U fish_user_paths /usr/local/bin $fish_user_paths

The advantage is that you don’t have to go mucking around in files: just run this once at the command line, and it will affect the current session and all future instances too. (Note: you should NOT add this line to config.fish. If you do, the variable will get longer each time you run fish!)

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Created: 22.10.2021