Change LSCOLORS using fish on macOS

Question

I'm trying to set the colour of dirs in Terminal on the latest version of macOS (12.5) with an M1 using fish.

I've tried both the suggested commands: set LSCOLORS XXXX and set -Ux LSCOLORS XXXX with XXXX being the desired colour eg G or "dir=1:37".

Both options do change the values in fish_variables (found in the.config/fish dir) but the colours stay the same.

I've looked through the preferences pane for Terminal itself as well as the fish_config but I can't see anything overriding what I'm trying to alter.

What am I missing? Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

Answer 1

Don't use set -U when exporting env vars. It's likely to cause problems. Just do set -x to export an env var. You should be able to confirm it is exported by running env | grep LS_COLORS env | grep LS_COLORS . For example, on my system:

> env | grep LS_COLORS
LS_COLORS=di=34:ln=35:so=32:pi=33:ex=31:bd=34;46:cd=34:su=0:sg=0:tw=0:ow=0:

If the var is exported and not producing the expected result then the problem has nothing to do with Fish. In particular, note that the macOS ls command (the /bin/ls one) does not recognize the LS_COLORS env var. That is a GNU Linux extension. I recommend installing the Homebrew package manager and then brew install coreutils which will provide gls command. You can then create a Fish function that invokes gls when you type ls .