Startup command search $PATH configuration on macOS

[RBerga06]

I'm a new user of Ghostty and so far I'm enjoying its speed, its native look and the huge number of available themes.

I'm trying to setup my Ghostty configuration to be shared between two machines (respectively, macOS 15 and Debian), and I would like for Ghostty to use fish as my shell. However, I don't feel confident enough to set fish as the default shell for my user (especially on Debian) because it's not a sh/bash/zsh drop-in and I think it might cause problems in the future.

Therefore, I'm trying to use command = fish in my configuration (I cannot use the absolute path because on the two systems it's different, see below). On Debian this works, but on macOS the terminal session ends immediatly with:

Last login: Sun Nov  1 11:10:15 on ttys000
bash: line 0: exec: fish: not found

I think this happens because, on Debian, fish is installed through apt and is therefore already in the system $PATH (at /usr/bin/fish), but on macOS I've installed it via Homebrew (/opt/homebrew/bin/fish) and apparently Ghostty cannot pick it up.

The configuration docs for command say:

If this is not an absolute path, it'll be looked up in the PATH.

My question is: do you happen to know how is this $PATH computed on macOS, and how can I modify it such that Ghostty is aware of Homebrew-installed binaries?

I've searched on the Internet but even editing /etc/paths or adding a new /etc/paths.d/Homebrew file does not seem to make any difference.

Thanks for Ghostty and for your time!

---

Edit: I'm using Ghostty v1.4.0

[paaloeye]

I've had similar scares about making Nushell as a default shell.
Here is my command:

command = /usr/bin/env XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config XDG_DATA_HOME=$HOME/.local/share XDG_STATE_HOME=$HOME/.local/state XDG_CACHE_HOME=$HOME/.cache SHELL=/opt/homebrew/bin/nu /opt/homebrew/bin/nu

Here is my PATH:

PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Applications/Ghostty.app/Contents/MacOS

What you can do is to place a fish-shim in /Applications/Ghostty.app/Contents/MacOS since it's in the PATH already.
Unfortunately, the other paths are SIP protected on modern macOS.

[RBerga06]

I generally don't like editing the contents of applications, since I would then need to remember it every time I update ghostty. But in case nothing else works, this is of course a good solution!

I had not thought about using /usr/bin/env inside command, I'll experiment with it. Thank you!

[RBerga06]

I can confirm the following config works for me (on macOS, I still have to test it on Debian):

command = env PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH" fish

Edit: tested on Debian and the same config works as well (which makes total sense since /opt/homebrew/bin does not exist)

[paaloeye]

btw, some shell integration might work with that command.
command parser is a bit picky and haven't gotten round to fix it yet.

[RBerga06]

Thank you, I wasn't thinking about it but I remember this being pointed out in the docs: I'll update my fish config accordingly.

Edit: surprisingly enough, fish shell integration seems to be working. However, I'll manually load it anyway in ~/.config/fish/config.fish in case I find myself running fish inside another shell. Thanks again for the help and have a nice day!

[00-kat]

My question is: do you happen to know how is this $PATH computed on macOS, and how can I modify it such that Ghostty is aware of Homebrew-installed binaries?

Ghostty runs you command from a Bash login shell on macOS, so you should just be able to add it in ~/.bashrc i believe. Not a macOS user though so I'm not 100% certain this works.

PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"

[RBerga06]

Thank you for the suggestion!

As an experiment I've tried putting this in the contents of ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile:

# .bashrc
echo "bashrc!"
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"

# .bash_profile
echo "bash_profile!"
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"

and, as I would intuitively expect:

$ env -i HOME="$HOME" bash -c 'echo "hi"'
hi
$ env -i HOME="$HOME" bash -lc 'echo "hi"'
bash_profile!
hi
$ env -i HOME="$HOME" bash
bashrc!
bash-3.2$ exit
$ env -i HOME="$HOME" bash -l
bash_profile!
bash-3.2$ exit
$

(env -i HOME="$HOME" was suggested here and passes a clean environment to the command, $HOME is necessary or else bash won't know where to find the .bash_profile and .bashrc)
So I guess that a bash login shell should always execute .bash_profile. However, when opening Ghostty (even after a logging out and then logging back in), neither bash_profile! nor bashrc! is printed, and the terminal fails to find fish anyway, which seems odd to me.

[paaloeye]

Ghostty runs you command from a Bash login shell on macOS, so you should just be able to add it in ~/.bashrc i believe. Not a macOS user though so I'm not 100% certain this works.

Nope, that shouldn't work. Ghostty runs it with --noprofile --norc which makes total sense to me.

pstree -p $GHOSTTY_PID:

-+= 00001 root /sbin/launchd
 \-+= 31114 paal /Users/paal/Documents/GitHub/workspace/oss/ghostty/zig-out-fork/Ghostty.app/Contents/MacOS/ghostty
   |-+= 59211 root /usr/bin/login -flp paal /bin/bash --noprofile --norc -c exec -l /usr/bin/env XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config XDG_DATA_HOME=$HOME/.local/share XDG_STATE_
   | \-+= 59212 paal /opt/homebrew/bin/nu