How to set my default shell on Mac?

Question

I do not like to retype fish every time I start terminal. I want fish on by default. How can I set fish shell as my default shell on a Mac?

Answer 1

From Terminal:

1. Add Fish to /etc/shells, which will require an administrative password:

   sudo echo /usr/local/bin/fish >> /etc/shells
   

2. Make Fish your default shell with chsh:

   chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish
   

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From System Preferences:

1. User and Groups → ctrl-click on Current User → Advanced Options...

2. Change Login shell to /usr/local/bin/fish

   

3. Press OK, log out and in again

Answer 2

On macOS Mojave I had to do the following (using zsh as an example):

brew install zsh
sudo sh -c "echo $(which zsh) >> /etc/shells"
chsh -s $(which zsh)

Answer 3

You can use chsh to change a user's shell.

Run the following code, for instance, to change your shell to Zsh

chsh -s /bin/zsh

As described in the manpage, and by Lorin, if the shell is not known by the OS, you have to add it to its known list: /etc/shells.

Answer 4

How to get the latest version of bash on modern macOS (tested on Mojave).

brew install bash
which bash | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
chsh -s $(which bash)

Then you are ready to get vim style tab completion which is only available on bash>=4 (current version in brew is 5.0.2

# If there are multiple matches for completion, Tab should cycle through them
bind 'TAB':menu-complete

# Display a list of the matching files
bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on"

# Perform partial completion on the first Tab press,
# only start cycling full results on the second Tab press
bind "set menu-complete-display-prefix on"

Answer 5

When in the terminal, open the terminal preferences using Command+,.

On the Setting Tab, select one of the themes, and choose the shell tab on the right.

You can set the autostart command fish.

Answer 6

The only thing that worked for me was a combination of all these methods.

1. First I had to add fish to the /etc/shells file

2. Then I ran chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish

3. Finally, I typed Command+, and added /usr/local/bin/fish to the default path there

Only after I had done all three things did fish start popping up as the default for new terminal windows.