Set up Fish Shell on macOS (Intel and Silicone)

Okay, you probably thought I must be joking, installing fish shell on macOS couldn’t be that hard. But believe me, at first, I had a hard time making everything work with fish the moment I installed it on macOS (Silicone). If you’re here, I assume you got fish installed on your machine, now, let’s figure out the rest.

Check the path #

Here lies the difference between Intel Macs and Silicone Macs, the location of fish is different between the two. You have to check the path using which fish:

# Silicone
/opt/homebrew/bin/fish

# Intel
/usr/local/bin/fish

In the examples below, I will use the Silicone Macs path, but you can replace them accordingly.

Make fish the default #

1. Add fish to the know shells by running the command:

sudo sh -c 'echo /opt/homebrew/bin/fish >> /etc/shells'

2. Restart your terminal
3. Set fish as the default shell using the command:

chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/fish

4. Restart your terminal and check if it launched with fish or not
5. Add brew binaries in fish path:

set -U fish_user_paths /opt/homebrew/bin $fish_user_paths

Optionnaly configure the shell (launch web interface) #

fish_config