Fixing PATH in fish with nix-darwin
During migration to nix for package and system management in environment#11, I’ve encountered an issue with PATH variable containing seemingly correct entries, but in incorrect order when using fish. Basically, $HOME/.nix-profile/bin is put in the end. Since I am very new to nix ecosystem (using it for few days), it was not clear what is causing this issue (my configuration, nix-home-manager, nix-darwin or fish itself), so I decided to investigate. While it turned out to be a known issue, I learned a little bit in the process and found a local fix, which I am sharing in the end of the post.
Fish: notify me when you finish
Have you ever been in a situation when you called git fetch, stared at the screen for several seconds and then switched to the browser to read something ‘useful’ while git fetches updates? And in five minutes you’re like ‘Oh wait, I was doing something important, no?’. Rings the bell, doesn’t it?
Make the Fish fly
I have always been inspired by the people who use (or at least can use) terminal for any kind of activity that is associated with programming. Sure, every task has its own set of instruments to be solved with. But there are instruments that you can count on in almost any situation. That’s why I spend so much time in the terminal.
For a long time (like a year and a half) I was using zsh beefed with oh-my-zsh. While it was providing me a lot of crucial functionality, I wasn’t very happy about oh-my-zsh, so when someone mentioned fish in comments to Use Haskell for shell scripting thread on Reddit, I decided to give it a try after few minutes of reading how awesome fish is.
In this article I am going to share my thoughts after using fish. But keep in mind that this is not a tutorial to fish (mostly because it already has a good written one, which covers most important aspects of day-to-day fish, but you might also want to read full documentation to get the full grasp).
Exploring new stuff is fun. So even if you are totally happy with your setup, I highly advice you to take a look at fish.