What's the proper way to make orb to default to the fish shell?

[ilyagr]

I'm currently usually doing orb fish to enter the Orbstack machine, but it's easy to forget about, so I'd rather change the default shell. However, it's unclear what the best way to do it is.

I could use the default analogue to chsh inside the container, but I'm worried that then /etc/profile might not be executed, as explained in https://fishshell.com/docs/current/#default-shell . In fact, after I tried it, variables like $__ETC_PROFILE_DONE that get set in /etc/profile disappeared from my environment.

Another option is described in https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Fish#Setting_fish_as_your_shell, but it's a little elaborate.

I was thinking that there might be an ORB_DEFAULT_COMMAND environment variable, but I didn't see anything like that in orbctl shell --help.

[ilyagr]

Here's the best solution I found so far. It's not pretty.

In the Mac fish shell's config.fish, add either

abbr orb --set-cursor=% "orb % fish"

or the uglier but safer (if you sometimes use Orbstack machines without fish)

abbr orb --set-cursor=% "orb % sh -c 'fish || bash'"

[rogererens]

@ilyagr Thanks; can you suggest what to type at the cursor (at the %-position) when the abbreviation is expanded? (fish noob here)

[ilyagr]

(This answers the unedited version of the question, see below for the answer to the edit)

can you explain what the white % and the blue % mean in these abbreviations?

The % is where the cursor goes after the abbreviation expands. See also https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/abbr.html#add-subcommand (more precise link if your browser supports it)

It's not an essential part of the abbreviation, but could be helpful if you want to change the expansion into something like orb -m somemachine sh -c 'fish || bash' or if you'd like to pass some other argument to orb run.

Also, this way the abbreviation won't mess up what happens if you type orb --help. It'll expand to orb --help sh -c 'fish || bash', but that is equivalent to just orb --help, unlike orb sh -c 'fish || bash' --help

[ilyagr]

can you suggest what to type at the cursor (at the %-position) when the abbreviation is expanded?

You don't have to type anything in there 90% of the time. Just press Enter. Typing orb<Enter> (without a space after orb) should also expand the abbreviation and just work. (It works for me, there's a 5% chance I configured something to make it that way, but I don't think so)

In the rare case you want to type some options, you can type them in as I described in my previous comment.

And if you want to start some command other than fish (as though the abbreviation didn't exist), you can press Ctrl-K to clear the fish invocation after the abbreviation expands.

[DanTulovsky]

Why not just change your shell directly inside the vm?

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

Note that I had to set a password for my account first:

❯ orb sudo passwd $USER

[ilyagr]

The main reason I avoid chsh is that I'd then have to check whether the system does any important configuration in places like .profile, .bash_profile, and their /etc counterparts. I think none (or only a subset?) of them are run if you chsh to fish, and I didn't feel like learning the details and then checking what each system does in the relevant config files.

Having to set a password also sounds a bit strange and annoying.