Interactive tool for managing Fish Shell's $fish_user_paths variable
Fish Shell has a really neat way of managing $PATH by adding to, or removing elements from, the $fish_user_paths variable-list. https://fishshell.com/docs/current/tutorial.html#path
... A faster way is to modify the $fish_user_paths universal variable, which is automatically prepended to $PATH.
However, each time I need to edit $fish_user_paths I completely forget how to do it or if I do remember, I usually fat finger something or accidently delete the wrong thing. Fish 3 helps with the addition of the -a and -p flags for adding elements to lists, but it's still to easy to screw up when deleting from them.
So I made a tool that will launch an interactive 🧙♂️ session for managing $fish_user_paths.
Fisher
fisher add lastcontinue/salmon_cannon
Oh-my-fish
omf install https://github.com/lastcontinue/salmon_cannon
Running salmon_cannon with no options will start the interactive session. This is probably what you want the first time.
You can add a path by [a]ppending (add to end of list), or [p]repending (beginning of list). After making your selection, just enter the path (no quotes required)
When you [d]elete a path, you can enter either enter the index of the path, or the actual path. For the example above, I entered 2, but entering /usr/local/opt/fzf/bin would have done the same thing.
It will tell you if you've entered something clearly not valid (however it doesn't go as far as making sure that all paths in $_fish_user_paths are valid. That's still up to you at this point in time, and there are cases where you might want to enter a non valid path, so that you can then create it later, etc. It would prevent "foot-shooting" to an extent though, so I may add that later)
"Yeah, but interactive modes are for N00bs"
Calm down, also made some options you can pass in:
salmon_cannon ( -a | --append ) NEW_PATH
This will just append a path to $fish_user_paths
salmon_cannon ( -d | --delete ) #INDEX|EXISTING_PATH
This will delete an element from the $fish_user_paths variable
salmon_cannon ( -l | --list )
This just lists out the current $fish_user_paths with the index before the path of each element
salmon_cannon ( -p | --prepend ) NEW_PATH
This will just prepend a path to $fish_user_paths
"I hate this name, too long"
Fish has amazing abbreviation cabilities. "Go nuts"
https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/abbr.html
(or fork this repo and change the name if you really want to go to that effort)
"Name is alright, don't like the underscore though..."
Yeah... maybe in retrospect it should have been a - 🤷♂️
"I hate the rest of this, but listing out
$fish_user_pathsis great"
I abstracted print_fish_user_paths into its own function because I could see this being useful for other people wanting to pipe into other commands. It just wraps
echo $fish_user_paths | tr " " "\n" | nl
with some nice fluff, but it could be useful to someone.
One of the many neat features added in Fish 3 was the --append and --prepend flags for set. These additions make this little tool less valuable to the lazy person (me), but it's still a fun little project for me.
For adding a new path, you can simply just do
set -Ua fish_user_paths /usr/local/sbin
or
set -Up fish_user_paths /usr/local/sbin
Depending on the order you want your paths. Deleting is a bit more tricky, so this tool is still a good choice for streamlining your efforts. You'd want to do something like
set -l index contains -i /usr/local/sbin $fish_user_paths
set -e fish_user_paths[$index]
Of course you could do that as a one-liner, but let's give readbility a chance.
Once again, Fish has decided to copy ideas from this project 😉
Fish 3.2.0 has introduced a function called fish_add_path. It's pretty neat and has some options for adding to $fish_user_paths that I might copy for this project. It doesn't seem like it does any deletion though, so this project is still a tinsy bit relevant.