How to let ROS play happily with fish

ROS is a common platform for robot development. Normally it has some descent document, but not for rosbash. It is stated in the document that

The rosbash package includes limited support for zsh and tcsh by way of sourcing the roszsh or rostcsh files respectively. We currently do not provide documentation on these shells, though much of the functionality is similar to the bash shell extensions.

What if I want to use fish shell instead of bash? There is a file called rosfish in Github but how to use that?

Getting functionalities such as roscd and rosed

Instead of sourcing source /opt/ros/lunar/setup.bash as is told in the official document, go to your ~/.config/fish/config.fish file (which is essentially .bashrc for bash), add the following line:

source /opt/ros/kinetic/share/rosbash/rosfish

Sourcing catkin workspace

To source your workspace, you can’t just source the file in devel/setup.bash since it’s written in shell script that fish do not understand. Instead, install bass as a bridge between fish and shell script. I recommend using fisherman for installing bass.

Now every time you need to source your workspace, run this:

bass source devel/setup.bash

I’m lazy. Is there a easier way?

I got you. Why sourcing scripts manually when everything can be automated? Let’s use fish’s excellent hook functionality to source the files for us.

Place the following file in ~/.config/fish/conf.d, you can name it catkin.autosource.fish or whatever

function catkinSource --on-variable PWD
    status --is-command-substitution; and return
    if test -e ".catkin_workspace"
        bass source devel/setup.bash
        echo "Configured the folder as a workspace"
    end
end

The script monitor the variable PWD, which is the location you’re at, if it changes, search for the .catkin_workspace file (which in the workspace when you create it). If it finds the file, the source it for you.

Happy fishing!