purcell/exec-path-from-shell

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1573 stars · 86 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A GNU Emacs library that copies environment variables like $PATH from the user's shell into Emacs, so GUI or daemon-launched Emacs sessions match the terminal environment. It supports zsh, bash, tcsh, fish, and nu shells.

Use cases

• fix commands that work in terminal but not in Emacs
• make GUI Emacs on macOS use my shell PATH
• sync environment variables into Emacs daemon started by systemd
• import custom env vars from zsh into Emacs
• make exec-path match my fish shell setup

When to choose

• you run Emacs as a GUI app on macOS or Linux and shell commands fail inside Emacs
• you start Emacs as a daemon from systemd or launchd and need your shell environment
• you want PATH, MANPATH, or other variables consistent between terminal and Emacs

When to avoid

• you only run Emacs inside a terminal, where it already inherits your shell environment
• you need PowerShell support - use the companion exec-path-from-powershell package instead

Facets

library · maturity stable

developer-tools configuration-management developer-tools text-editors cross-platform emacs elisp environment-variables path shell melpa macos linux emacs-lisp desktop

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