fish_variables has too large size make fish has a significant delays during startup about fish-shell HOT 1 CLOSED

fish_variables is the store for fish's universal variables. This happens when you append to a universal variable, including in config.fish.

E.g. if you put this in your config.fish:

set -U foo $foo bar

it will increase in size.

This behavior suggests that there may be a bug causing an unnecessary growth of fish_variables, directly impacting the startup performance of the fish shell.

I'm about 98% confident that the issue is in your configuration, as this is a reasonably common mistake.

Given that your fish_variables file includes a massive $fish_user_paths, I'm guessing that you append to $fish_user_paths somewhere in your config.

fish, version 3.1.0

Also that fish version is 4 years and 6 feature releases out of date, it is missing 33% of commits compared to 3.7.1.

If you want to report a bug, please upgrade fish first. We offer packages for a variety of distributions, including Ubuntu, at https://fishshell.com/.

This particular issue was worked around in #8117 in 3.4.0, and made easier to avoid with the introduction of fish_add_path in #6960 (in 3.2.0).

from fish-shell.