You're aware you can configure your PATH trivially from fish, right? The preferred way to do that would be something like if status --is-interactive

You're aware you can configure your PATH trivially from fish, right? The preferred way to do that would be something like if status --is-interactive set PATH ~/.local/bin /opt/local/bin $PATH end in your ~/.config/fish/config.fish file. Your other shells have the paths you want either because you configured them that way at some point, or because their global configs (e.g. /etc/bashrc) have broader paths. There's nothing magic going on here.