How to set my default shell on Mac?
Question
I do not like to retype fish every time I start terminal. I want fish
on by default. How can I set fish shell as my default shell on a Mac?
Solution
These are applicable to MacOS Sierra 10.12.5 (16F73) and probably some other recent and upcoming versions of MacOS.
chsh
is not enough to change the default shell. Make sure you press Command+, while your terminal is open and change the 'Shells open with' option to 'Default login shell.'In case of bash, make sure that you execute
echo $BASH_VERSION
to confirm you are running the intended version of bash.bash --version
does not give you correct information.
OTHER TIPS
1. sudo nano /etc/shells
2. add /usr/local/bin/fish to your list of shells
3. chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
You can use chsh to change a user's shell.
Run the following code, for instance, to change your shell to Zsh
chsh -s /bin/zsh
As described in the manpage, and by Lorin, if the shell is not known by the OS, you have to add it to its known list: /etc/shells
.
From Terminal:
Add Fish to
/etc/shells
, which will require an administrative password:sudo echo /usr/local/bin/fish >> /etc/shells
Make Fish your default shell with
chsh
:chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
From System Preferences:
User and Groups → ctrl-click on Current User → Advanced Options...
Change Login shell to
/usr/local/bin/fish
Press OK, log out and in again
Here's another way to do it:
Assuming you installed it with MacPorts, which can be done by doing:
sudo port install fish
Your shell will be located in /opt/local/bin/fish
.
You need to tell OSX that this is a valid shell. To do that, add this path to the end of the /etc/shells
file.
Once you've done this, you can change the shell by going to System Preferences -> Accounts. Click on the Lock to allow changes. Right-click on the account, and choose "Advanced Options...". In the "Login shell" field, add the path to fish.
The only thing that worked for me was a combination of all these methods.
First I had to add fish to the
/etc/shells
fileThen I ran
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
Finally, I typed Command+, and added
/usr/local/bin/fish
to the default path there
Only after I had done all three things did fish start popping up as the default for new terminal windows.
Terminal.app > Preferences
> General
> Shells open with:
> /bin/fish
- Open your terminal and press command+, (comma). This will open a preferences window.
- The first tab is 'General'.
- Find 'Shells open with' setting and choose 2nd option which needs complete path to the shell.
- Paste the link to your fish command, which generally is
/usr/local/bin/fish
.
See this screenshot where zsh
is being set as default.
I am using macOS Sierra. Also works in macOS Mojave.
On macOS Mojave I had to do the following (using zsh as an example):
brew install zsh
sudo sh -c "echo $(which zsh) >> /etc/shells"
chsh -s $(which zsh)
How to get the latest version of bash on modern macOS (tested on Mojave).
brew install bash
which bash | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
chsh -s $(which bash)
Then you are ready to get vim style tab completion which is only available on bash>=4 (current version in brew
is 5.0.2
# If there are multiple matches for completion, Tab should cycle through them
bind 'TAB':menu-complete
# Display a list of the matching files
bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on"
# Perform partial completion on the first Tab press,
# only start cycling full results on the second Tab press
bind "set menu-complete-display-prefix on"
This work for me on fresh install of mac osx (sierra):
- Define current user as owner of shells
sudo chown $(whoami) /etc/shells
- Add Fish to /etc/shells
sudo echo /usr/local/bin/fish >> /etc/shells
- Make Fish your default shell with chsh
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
- Redefine root as owner of shells
sudo chown root /etc/shells
the chsh
program will let you change your default shell. It will want the full path to the executable, so if your shell is fish
then it will want you to provide the output given when you type which fish
.
You'll see a line starting with "Shell:
". If you've never edited it, it most likely says "Shell: /bin/bash
". Replace that /bin/bash
path with the path to your desired shell.
When in the terminal, open the terminal preferences using Command+,.
On the Setting Tab, select one of the themes, and choose the shell tab on the right.
You can set the autostart command fish
.
heimdall:~ leeg$ dscl
Entering interactive mode... (type "help" for commands)
> cd /Local/Default/Users/
/Local/Default/Users > read <<YOUR_USER>>
[...]
UserShell: /bin/bash
/Local/Default/Users >
just change that value (with the write command in dscl
).
In case you are having troubles with the other ways, worked on mac Mojave but should generally work.
which fish
add the output path to "System Preferences > Users & Groups > right click user, Advanced Options" Paste the result from which into "Login shell:"
To change your default shell on mac run the following:
chsh -s <name-of-shell>
List of shells you can choose from are:
- /bin/bash
- /bin/csh
- /bin/dash
- /bin/ksh
- /bin/sh
- /bin/tcsh
- /bin/zsh
so if you want to change from to the /bin/zsh shell, your command will look like:
chsh -s /bin/zsh
you can see all the available shells on your system by running:
cat /etc/shells
edit .zshrc and change it to
exec /bin/bash
or to whatever shell you might prefer. Bonus: this doesn't require root access and will work on every version of osx.
The only problem is that it doesn't read .bash_profile this way; it is only read if bash is run as an interactive login shell, you would have to include it from .bashrc with something like this:
if [[ "$OSTYPE" == "darwin"* ]]; then
#local hack on osx.
if [[ -f $HOME/.bash_profile ]]; then
. $HOME/.bash_profile
fi
fi
Homebrew on M1 macs should use /opt/homebrew
instead of /usr/local
.
You can check the fish location which fish
. For me the fish was in /opt/homebrew/bin/fish
which was the location I have added to etc/shells