For those wondering why Apple is allergic to GPLv3 code: there is a clause in the license requiring you provide a way to run modified version of the software which would require Apple to let users self sign executables.
Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
21–30 of 252 posts
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#22For the uninitiated: why is zsh better than bash?
Tab autocompletion, especially for command-line flags, is great. Try it out with 'ls -' and you'll see all the options and a description. The z command to cd to common directories without typing the full path seems useful, but I've never gotten it to work.
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most Terminal users might not even notice the shell changed from Bash to ZSH. If that's an argument in favor of ZSH, I think I've missed the point.
It’s an argument in favour of ZSH over Fish. It will cause less disruption, while providing better features than the current default.
> while providing better features than the current default.
Barely—it doesn't address any fundamental issues with bash, it's basically a coat of paint.
It does make sense that tech companies are only into disruption if they can profit from it.
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#24zsh is better than bash in nearly all aspects, at least in my use cases, so this is a great news for me. Is there anything that can be done in bash but not in zsh?
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#25I'm really surprised they went with zsh rather than fish. I guess they want to preserve the ability for existing `source` scripts to work.
Exactly, compatibility. fish has a somewhat different syntax to bash.
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they use fish? Fish is nice and all, but zsh is a much more mainstream shell.
Since when is mainstream better? Why did they choose zsh? They don't justify that either. It's just odd to pick one post-bash shell but not the other when they have very similar feature sets—autocomplete, persistent global variables, attention to end-user quality. EDIT: apparently zsh doesn't have persistent or global variables, my bad.
There's already a lot of community support available for zsh.
Plenty of developers are using oh-my-zsh either for just the plugin support or for the very popular iterm+powerlevel9k+agnoster theming.
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#27I still fondly remember when tcsh was the default shell. Like a real BSD Unix.
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really annoying to learn bash, so I don't see how that works in zsh's favor.
To be honest I'm hesitant to respond to you because of the level of spittle-flecking you're doing in this thread but I would guess that, by virtue of bash being the standard Mac shell and zsh being a close-enough-but-better replacement, the necessary learning has already happened and overwhelmingly more Mac terminal users will be at least functional with it immediately.
Not the OP, but I agree with both of you actually. It's easier in many ways to run a POSIX-compliant shell with a more "familiar" scripting language to bash users (especially when it comes to running existing scripts or one-liners you find online).... buuuut at the same time I think it's pretty clear that fish's scripting language is much more modern and "better" in many ways.
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mainstream is often better in terms of unofficial support/learning resources, and by definition better in terms of familiarity/market share. For something like a shell, forcing a niche choice needs justification when it's not clearly better than the alternatives.
Fish is clearly better than the alternatives.
Well, fish is not compatible to bash. Users would suddenly face bash-one-liners that they find on StackOverflow to stop working.
Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac
#30Maybe I’m imagining things, but wasn’t zsh also the default until MacOS 10.4 or so?
Edit: I was misremembering things. tcsh until 10.3.