plugin-foreign-env VS fish-shell

I am not using Guix's Fish because right I just installed it and was hoping to kinda get my packages up to snuff for what I keep on my desktop. Though I was about to install foreign-env via omf and that seems to work! I am super new to Guix so I still gotta read up on Guix Home. I literally have only installed like 6 packages right now haha.

The official installer leverages an initialization script, to be sourced at shell init time, which is written in POSIX shell. Fish can't just source it because it's not compatible with POSIX shell.

> I then searched the Internet and found a very "creative" workaround for Arch users that didn't work either.

Arch users shouldn't need anything special here.

You can use fenv¹ to source it, you can translate it to bash using babelfish, or you can exec into fish after running bash to log in (make sure to set $SHELL after if you choose that option). Just make sure you do it as early as possible if you want to use things installed by Nix in your other Fish config snippets.

I think Home Manager will also take care of this for you. (The other module systems, Nix-Darwin and NixOS, both do.)

If you wanna do it like NixOS does, you can install Fish via Nix and then create your own preinit environment script in /etc/fish. This has the advantage of setting up your Nix environment variables before any other config is sourced. You can take a look at it here, which also explains some of the Fish initialization process: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

and here's where the hooks go in the Fish package, where the comments describe the Fish initialization process in detail as well as why things are done this way on NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

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1: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/plugin-foreign-env

2: https://github.com/bouk/babelfish

That's just not true, most stuff already has a fish equivalent, and for the minority which doesn't there are plugins like foreign-env

I'm also interested in the correct way of doing this. Right now, I cheat by using the fenv plugin to source a bash ~/.profile file:

Reminds of the note at the bottom of Fish's releases. It's there because the build system cannot determine the current version for some reason. Hopefully that will go away now that they have switched to a different language / build system. The custom tarball is used by Arch Linux at the very least.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases/tag/3.7.1

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/7772#issueco...

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

A recent practical example of the former: the fish shell re-wrote incrementally from C++ to Rust, and is almost finished https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

An example of the latter: c2rust, which is a work in progress but is very impressive https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

It currently translates into unsafe Rust, but the strategy is to separate the "compile C to unsafe Rust" steps and the "compile unsafe Rust to safe Rust" steps. As I see it, as it makes the overall task simpler, allows for more user freedom, and makes the latter potentially useful even for non-transpiled code. https://immunant.com/blog/2023/03/lifting/

And this discussion from November has an update on the progress: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

We're using bash as our terminal shell for now (it is standard in many distros) but it is not the only one out there. If you want to test out zsh, fish or oh-my-zsh, you will see that there are a few differences and the features are usually the main differentiator. Try that, poke around.

They have a variety of reasons to move to rust, as outlined in their original rust discussion[1]. Mostly around finding other contributors, and adding an async/parallel mode they're comfortable with.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512