fish: add ~/bin and ~/.local/bin to PATH (fixes missing starship prompt on Linux)#12
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Fish never set up PATH the way the bash/zsh stack does. rc.common prepends "$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin" to PATH, but fish's config had no equivalent — only the macOS-only Homebrew shellenv block. On Linux where fish is the login shell (e.g. SSH after chsh to fish), the login PATH lacks ~/bin, so tools installed there are invisible. starship (installed to ~/bin by setup/tools.sh) couldn't be found, so `type -q starship` in config.fish was false and the prompt block was silently skipped — fish fell back to its default prompt instead of starship. Add conf.d/path.fish using fish_add_path so fish owns its PATH setup, mirroring rc.common. conf.d loads before config.fish, so PATH is ready before the starship block runs. Also drop functions/fish_prompt.fish: it was a verbatim copy of fish's built-in default prompt and only mattered as a fallback when starship was absent. It is redundant (fish's built-in default is identical) and was a red herring while diagnosing the missing prompt. https://claude.ai/code/session_01MWWuGHpDryzmyVdGGVvtZ1
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Problem
On a Linux box where fish is the login shell (
chshto/usr/bin/fish, reached over SSH), the starship prompt didn't load — fish showed its plain default prompt while bash on the same machine showed starship. The deeper issue: fish never set up PATH, so user-installed tools in~/binwere invisible.Root cause
The POSIX/bash/zsh stack gets its PATH from
rc.common:Fish had no equivalent — the only PATH code in fish config was the macOS-only Homebrew
brew shellenvblock. So a fish login shell on Linux started with the bare PAM//etc/environmentPATH, which lacks~/bin.setup/tools.shinstalls starship to~/bin. With~/binoff PATH,type -q starshipinconfig.fishwas false, so the starship init block was silently skipped and fish fell back to its built-in default prompt.This was easy to misdiagnose because a
fish -icsubshell spawned from bash inherits bash's PATH (which does have~/bin), so it found starship — making config.fish look correct. macOS works because starship is reachable there via Homebrew (/opt/homebrew/bin, added by the brew block).Confirmed with a clean login-like environment:
Change
home/.config/fish/conf.d/path.fish— usesfish_add_path -gp $HOME/bin $HOME/.local/binso fish owns its PATH setup, mirroringrc.common.conf.d/loads beforeconfig.fish, so PATH is ready before the starship block runs.-gkeeps it config-driven and reproducible (no per-host universal vars);fish_add_pathis idempotent.home/.config/fish/functions/fish_prompt.fish— it was a verbatim copy of fish's built-in default prompt, only relevant as a fallback when starship is absent (and identical to fish's built-in default). It was a red herring during diagnosis and is dead weight.Deploy / verify
After merge, on the Linux box:
Then a fresh login fish shows the starship prompt and
echo $PATHincludes~/binand~/.local/bin.No
setup/*.shscripts changed, sojust lint(shellcheck) is unaffected.https://claude.ai/code/session_01MWWuGHpDryzmyVdGGVvtZ1
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