FISH_GREETING(1)

🐟 FISH_GREETING(1) — the fish-shell one 🐟

okay bestie, welcome to the fish_greeting page, part of the fish-shell manual 💅 this is the little diva that says hi when you open a terminal, and she is literally the moment.

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✨ NAME ✨

fish_greeting — display a welcome message in interactive shells 🫶

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

fish_greeting

function fish_greeting
    ...
end

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so when an interactive fish starts up, it runs fish_greeting and shows whatever that spits out. that's it, that's the whole vibe ✨

the default fish_greeting is a function that prints a variable with the same name ($fish_greeting), so like — if all you wanna do is change the text, you can just change that variable and be done. no cap, easiest glow-up ever 💅

if SHELL_WELCOME is set, it gets displayed after the greeting. that's a standard environment variable that tools like systemd's run0 may set to display session information 👑

and yeah, you could just shove some echo calls into config.fish, but fish_greeting is that girl because it takes care of only being used in interactive shells — so it won't be used with, like, scp (which executes a shell), and that prevents some errors. main character energy fr fr 🎀

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🍓 EXAMPLE 🍓

wanna just empty the text? with the default greeting function, do this:

set -U fish_greeting

or set -g fish_greeting in config.fish 🧚

a simple greeting, iconic and lowkey:

function fish_greeting
    echo Hello friend!
    echo The time is (set_color yellow)(date +%T)(set_color --reset) and this machine is called $hostname
end

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👑 Copyright 👑

fish-shell developers

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okay that's the whole page, you ate that 💖 now go make your shell say something cute, bestie 🌈

— with love, from fish-shell 4.9, dated Sep 08, 2026 🦋✨🎀