How to open new terminal window in previous directory using fish shell?

Question

I use fish shell and Gnome-Terminal Version 3.44.

When I open a new terminal I'd like it to start up in the previously-visited directory. How can I implement this via fish shell?

Answer 1

You have a few options as to when to save the directory:

• When you exit the shell
• Or each time the directory changes

I'll use the "each time" approach for this example. First, I recommend exiting all but one terminal/fish shell. This will allow subsequent shell invocations to load the new function properly.

Create a Fish script that runs at startup:

~/.config/fish/conf.d/starting_dir.fish:

set -q fish_most_recent_dir && [ -d "$fish_most_recent_dir" ] && cd "$fish_most_recent_dir"

function save_dir --on-variable PWD
    set -U fish_most_recent_dir $PWD
end

This will:

• check that the fish_most_recent_dir variable exists, that it refers to an existing directory, and changes to it if so.

• create a save_dir function that saves the current directory to the fish_most_recent_dir universal variable whenever the directory changes (--on-variable PWD).

The save_dir event function needs to be forcibly loaded at startup this way because autoload functions can't handle events in fish.

Note that if there are any other cd statements in your startup config, they may get executed after this function. If that happens, they'll override this.

If you want to save the working directory only when Fish exits, you would change the event function to use --on-event fish_exit instead.