[ridiculous_fish]

Do you mind sharing more details about your legacy environment configuration? How are you currently setting $PATH? Usually the differences in syntax for setting variables causes more problems than the colons.

Regarding $PATH: it is actually not delimited at all in fish. Instead, $PATH is an array, which is a first class notion in fish. This allows for nice tricks like, say, looping through $PATH:

   for dir in $PATH
        echo $dir
   end

or deleting its last entry:

    set --erase PATH[-1]

Of course, fish flattens $PATH into a colon-delimited string when setting it as an environment variable, and unflattens it when reading it from the environment.

[sliverstorm]

PATH gets set the way it always did. For example in bash:

export PATH=$PATH:<new_dir>

As for the larger question of environment configuration; we pull in a number of shell configuration scripts owned by the infrastructure teams. You are right, there is no universal way to set path due to things like "export" vs "setenv", but often multiple shells support the same syntax so you can sometimes use a config script meant for bash in zsh, for example. I had hoped that fish would be able to use csh scripts, because it shares "setenv", but csh of course delimits PATH with colons.

You say that PATH is treated as a colon-delimited string when accessed as an environment variable... Hmm. That wasn't what I was seeing, but it is entirely possible I made a mess of things, or that I broke things when I compiled it.

Anyway, it's unlikely I personally will be able to use fish. I hit many more obstacles than just PATH, but that was the easiest example and I thought I'd share some feedback.

[ridiculous_fish]

Thanks for elaborating. Yes, it's a common issue to encounter configuration scripts, .profile files, etc. that use POSIX syntax, and it's understandable that people will be unwilling or unable to port them to fish. Usually these are just standalone scripts which can be run directly via /bin/sh, but sometimes you want them to be part of your interactive shell.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/522 tracks having a bash compatibility layer - as you can see there's a lot of discussion!