Set up Fish shell on macOS (Intel and Apple 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