Set Default Shell in Cygwin - shell

Question

I've been using Cygwin for quite a while now. I now want to switch to fish from bash. Everyone is saying that you should use chsh -s /usr/bin/fish, but for some reason, chsh does not work for me. Trying to modify my Cygwin.bat file doesn't work either, and neither does changing my /etc/passwd file.
I really don't understand what's going on. Could someone please help me?

Answer 1

Try editing /etc/nsswitch.conf instead of /etc/passwd
Instead of creating a passwd file, which Cygwin recommends against1, you could edit /etc/nsswitch.conf. Add or edit the following line:
db_shell: /usr/bin/fish
The down/up side of this method is that, if you have multiple users, this change affects all of them. The up/up side is that it's dead simple. The only catch is that you have to restart Cygwin.
If you do use mkpasswd after this change, it will use your new default shell for all users that are allowed to log on.
References
1 The mkpasswd documentation says this:
Don't use this command to generate a local /etc/passwd file, unless you really need one. See the Cygwin User's Guide for more information.
I can't really find any solid reasoning in the user's guide, other than a mention that you'll have to regenerate the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files if your users and groups change, which I suppose is a decent enough reason. I can say that the process is somewhat error prone for newbies.

Answer 2

I randomly meet the same problem, and now I providing my solution for you.
0- Open cygwin by mintty.exe
1- Build passwd file manually (mkpasswd)
$mkpasswd > /etc/passwd
2- Change default shell in passwd file
$vim /etc/passwd
user:*:1976XX:1971XX:U-user\user,S-1-5-21-XXXX:/home/user:/bin/fish
3- Restart mintty.exe

Answer 3

There's an answer on SuperUser that is even simpler. Set the SHELL environment variable in Windows. Set it to your preferred shell (e.g. /bin/tcsh) and newly-launched shells should use it.
To set environment variables:
Go to the "System" control panel (right-click on the Start menu and select "System")
Click on "Advanced system settings" in the left-side column
From the "System Properties" window that pops up, click the "Environment Variables..." button
In either the "User variables" or "System variables" box (depending on whether you want the change to affect just yourself or all users), click the "New..." button.
Type "SHELL" in the "Variable name" box and the path (relative to the Cygwin file system) to your preferred shell in the "Variable value" box.
Click OK on the three open windows to save your changes.

Answer 4

I'm not sure how 'proper' of a solution this is, but I just added /usr/bin/zsh; exit to the bottom of my .bashrc file. You can substitute /usr/bin/zsh for the path to your shell of choice. It seems to work just fine so far.

Answer 5

If you're running Cygwin through ConEmu I found the easiest way is to replace commands line to run fish instead of default shell (Settings->Startup->Tasks):
""c:\cygwin64\bin\fish.exe" --login -i" (please change path to your cygwin folder accordingly)

Answer 6

I wanted to comment on the accepted answer, but not enough rep.
Regarding this method
$ mkpasswd > /etc/passwd
While this works to generate an /etc/passwd file, the odds are you're installing cygwin for yourself, and if your computer belongs to a domain, mkpasswd may run out and attempt to consume the entire domain user list. I had a 500MB+ /etc/passwd file from exactly this condition, and cygwin wouldn't even start until I deleted the file.
I strongly recommend, if using the mkpasswd route to use the -c switch, so it puts an entry in only for yourself.
$ mkpasswd -c > /etc/passwd
On a machine with a shared cygwin service (assuming you have write permissions)
$ mkpasswd -c >> /etc/passwd

Answer 7

I was trying to change my default shell in cygwin to zsh and I found parts of the answers
here helpful, but none of them gave a full solution. The best instructions I found were in the "installing zsh" instruction in the oh my zsh github repo by Robby Russel that you can find here
At the top of the page it has general instructions for installing zsh and then specific instructions for many different platforms. You can scroll down to the Cygwin section and follow the steps:
"The easiest way to change the default shell is to set your SHELL user environment variable. Search for "Edit Environment variables for your account" to bring up the environment variables window, create a new variable named "SHELL" and give it the value "/usr/bin/zsh/"."
(On Windows 7:
Press Windows key.
Start typing "environment".
When it appears, select "Edit environment variables for your account" and add the new variable as stated above.)
After I did this I closed and reopened my Cygwin shell window and tested that it worked with echo $SHELL. Expected result: /bin/zsh or similar.
Hope this helps!

Answer 8

Go to c:\cygwin or c:\cygwin64 (whatever is your cygwin home directory) and edit cygwin.bat. Instead of
bash --login -i
write, for example,
rem bash --login -i
tcsh -l

Answer 9

One simple way to do this is call tcsh at the end of .bashrc file
# x2=$(dirs +${cnt} 2>/dev/null)
# [[ $? -ne 0 ]] && return 0
# [[ ${x2:0:1} == '~' ]] && x2="${HOME}${x2:1}"
# if [[ "${x2}" == "${the_new_dir}" ]]; then
# popd -n +$cnt 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
# cnt=cnt-1
# fi
# done
#
# return 0
# }
#
# alias cd=cd_func
tcsh
alias g=gvim
source ~/.cshrc
source ~/.aliases