$PATH on OS X again

[ahti]

So, fish does /etc/paths now, which is great. There is one thing that does not work that well though:

With system-bash, my path looks like this:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:
/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/MacGPG2/bin:/usr/local/share/npm/bin:/usr/texbin

this is pretty much what i expected according to my /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d/*.

/usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin
/opt/X11/bin /usr/local/MacGPG2/bin /usr/texbin /usr/local/share/npm/bin

The problem is, that fish does not reorder things that are in $PATH already when /usr/local/share/fish/config.fish is executed. I put a echo $PATH at the top of the file, and it seems that this:

/usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin

is the path fish inherits from launchd.

I think that, if a /etc/paths file is found, fish should throw away the old path, and rebuild it completely from the files.

This would also mean moving the reconstruction of fish_user_path after the Mac OS X bit.

It also seems fish orders the files in /etc/paths.d/ a bit differently than path_helper, but I don't think thats really an issue. The files I have in that directory are named as follows:

40-XQuartz
MacGPG2
TeX
npm 

[ahti]

Oh, I just saw the old issue is still open, too: #417

[ridiculousfish]

bash does not actually throw away the PATH it inherits. Instead it just keeps accumulating more junk onto it.

[ridiculousfish]

We should not blow away $PATH entirely, but commit dead45f and 9f46881 should reorder the contents of $PATH so that stuff in /etc/paths comes earlier, which I think should address this. Thanks for reporting this.

[albertz]

Is this intended behavior? I find it quite confusing. E.g. when I'm in another shell (bash, ZSH, or whatever), or even any other tool, where there is already $PATH defined (which I have like I want it, on purpose, by setting it e.g. in ~/.bash_profile, such that I e.g. have ~/.homebrew/bin and ~/.local/bin in the beginning of $PATH, which is what I want), and then I start fish, suddenly my $PATH is totally reordered (my own entries which I want to have at the front are not anymore there).

If this is intended behavior, could we have at least an option to disable this?

[faho]

@albertz: #5456.

[albertz]

@faho Thanks. But it doesn't answer my question: How to disable that? I don't want that Fish changes/reorders my $PATH (or maybe only add entries at the end).

[faho]

You don't. It's something we probably should change. But we shouldn't change it by introducing some weird option, but by making the default better.

[albertz]

Ah, yes, that would be even better. :) I was thinking that you actually want to keep that behavior, because you (or some other people) think this is the better behavior for some reason.