How to define a default shell for emacs

Question

My default shell is fish and I don't want to change it. But in Emacs Tramp doesn't work well with fish. So I just want to set bash as default shell for Emacs only. Is it possible?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic; suggest migration to emacs.stackexchange.com — tripleee
– tripleee, Commented May 24, 2016 at 9:29

duthen · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-30 10:19:37Z

14

From the documentation for the shell function (C-h f shell RET):

Program used comes from variable `explicit-shell-file-name',
 or (if that is nil) from the ESHELL environment variable,
 or (if that is nil) from `shell-file-name'.

So, if you want to use "/bin/bash" as the shell file in emacs buffers, you can either:

set the variable `explicit-shell-file-name' in your ~/.emacs file:

(setq-default explicit-shell-file-name "/bin/bash")
set the ESHELL environment variable in your ~/.profile file:

export ESHELL=/bin/bash
set the variable `shell-file-name' in your ~/.emacs file:

(setq-default shell-file-name "/bin/bash")

answered May 30, 2016 at 10:19

duthen

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Michael Albinus · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-24 19:07:45Z

2

The Tramp manual speaks about problems with fish. Maybe you try what's proposed there:

Similar fancy prompt settings are known from the fish shell.
Here you must add in ‘~/.config/fish/config.fish’:

     function fish_prompt
       if test $TERM = "dumb"
          echo "\$ "
       else
          …
       end
     end

answered May 24, 2016 at 19:07

Michael Albinus

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