Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#161

Post by GuB-42 » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 11:17 AM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #130

72deluxe wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"from a development standpoint, MacOS still seems way ahead of Windows" Sorry but have you heard of Visual Studio?

Everyone has heard of Visual Studio, and nobody that has to use it wants to. Just because you have Stockholm syndrome doesn't mean everyone else has to have it too ;-)

It has been a long time since I used Visual Studio but I remember it as the best IDE I have ever used for C++.

I am now working on Linux with Sublime Text, Makefiles and the command line. I am most comfortable with that setup but there are many features that I miss from VS: the debugger, online help, code navigation, ...

Not that these features don't exist in other editors and IDEs, but with VS, they worked reliably and out of the box.

Note: VSCode is completely different. It is a multi-platform text editor, one of the best in town. A bit lacking in the performance department though, that's why I am still using Sublime Text.

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#162

Post by bojanz » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 11:18 AM UTC

zsh users, good time to try out my favorite prompt, Pure: https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure

Nowadays that's the only thing I run on top of zsh, which makes the shell significantly faster than with oh-my-zsh (and its kitchen sink).

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#163

Post by imglorp » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 11:28 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #111

AaronFriel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, Homebrew? You can't tell me that Microsoft is able to ship entire distribution's userlands (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, and more) through the Windows Store, including all their GPL3 components, and Apple can't figure out how to ship an updated version of base64. If I'm grumbling, it's just because making devops/CI scripts work on Windows and Linux is easier than MacOS and Linux these days because my colleagues run into…

That is nothing compared to writing portable UNIX scripts during the UNIX wars. Having to deal with three variants is relatively simple. Now having to deal with DG/UX, Aix, Tru64, SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, BSD and the new incumbent Linux, that was fun.

Yup, and then down in the code, it was #ifdef's up to your eyeballs[1], even if you went all the way and used autoconf/configure and then... more #ifdefs.

And we can tell our kids we had this thing called endianness which showed up in structure packing, system calls, network byte ordering, and hopefully portable binary file formats. Thankfully we had RPC and IDL to save us from that mess... not.

Oh and don't forget the windowing system war on top of the Unix war, all with different desktop and library concepts: CDE, Motif, Openwin, NeWS, DM, X11 and X10 at least.

One compatibility honorable mention goes to Apollo for at least making an attempt at flavor normalization: you could have an env var that would resolve a symlink at every file access near the top of the filesystem, where there would be a collection of different BSD/SystemV/Aegis(?) all running at once. [2]

1. https://maultech.com/chrislott/resources/cstyle/ifdefs.pdf

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#164

Post by lostmyoldone » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 11:28 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #61

1over137 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you notice how many qualifiers you had there? The trend on macOS is clear: harder and harder to run/do anything that isn't blessed by Apple.

SIP and Gatekeeper and one-time commands. I find disabling SIP to be much less painful than enabling unsigned drivers in Windows. I wouldn't even classify turning off SIP as "slightly tricky". You boot into recovery mode, open the terminal, type in two words, and press enter. Besides, this is separate from the GPLv3 question. You can absolutely recompile bash and replace macOS's version with your own, so I don't unde…

It's not a problem, yet. But I would argue that it's quite clear from Apple's actions the last ~5 years that they really want to make Mac OS behave as iOS as much as possible, including making it impossible for regular users to run arbitrary non app store software.

I know it sounds crazy, but they have for years now been taking steps - like this - which nobody seems to find a rational cause for, but which step by step seem to remove obstacles of technically, legal, or user expectations in line with making OS X an app store only platform, and if possible completely replace OS X with iOS.

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#165

Post by rusk » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 11:44 AM UTC

holoduke wrote: post #150

jxi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those seem like pretty big downsides to me, and I don't believe the new terminal marketing gimmick. I will admit Windows has been very attractive lately for gaming reasons, but from a development standpoint, MacOS still seems way ahead of Windows. I seriously considered it, but there would be too much I'd miss if I switched. There's some minor reasons too, like why does IntelliJ look ugly in Windows? It looks great i…

Well did you try out Linux bash on windows. In less than 2 minutes you setup a Debian instance. You got shells and everything. All well known ide's are available on both Windows and Mac. In my opinion there is no real difference anymore. I am a Mac user and windows user. The only reason why I still use my Mac is because of the ergonomics.

In my experience Mac OS still has the edge in terms of stability. But certainly the gap is closing.

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#166

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 11:49 AM UTC

ernst_klim wrote: post #154

GlennS wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really suprised at this comment. I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio. In my opinion, Visual Studio massively outclasses Eclipse, VSCode and Netbeans. It even makes IntelliJ (which is pretty great too) look a bit inadequate. (I use Emacs these days though.)

>from a development standpoint >I'm confident most of the .NET community is very happy with Visual Studio .NET is not the only ecosystem people develop for. There are embedded C/Forth, web frontend/backend, written in Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, other stuff. VS sucks for nearly everything safe C#/C++ for windows. Besides, even for C# people use an additional plugin, resharper, so VS is not enough even for its target e…

> Besides, even for C# people use an additional plugin, resharper, so VS is not enough even for its target ecosystem.

Those that have CPU cycles and memory to spare do.

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#167

Post by notacoward » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 12:06 PM UTC

hestefisk wrote: post #27

I still fondly remember when tcsh was the default shell. Like a real BSD Unix.

I still not-so-fondly remember when csh was the default shell, on a real BSD-from-Berkeley can't-call-it-UNIX. :-P

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#168

Post by 0x0 » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 12:06 PM UTC

sitharus wrote: post #98

1over137 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not anymore. Since 10.12 Sierra the GUI option to turn off Gatekeeper is gone, you have to use command line to turn it off. And now App Notarization is making it harder still to run your own software.

How so? I can run anything I like via the command line, and right-click -> Open still launches unsigned executables. Sure there are warnings, but that's not hard to get past.

Only for local administrator user accounts I believe

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#169

Post by anentropic » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 12:20 PM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #134

tannhaeuser wrote: post #128

While Apple is at modernizing their POSIX userland, they should also consider other ancient software they're using. For example, last I looked on Apple's Darwin Open Source site (about a year or two ago), they shipped a really old and buggy awk (nawk) version.

Can we get a modern python version while we're at it?

tip: use pyenv instead

Re: Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac

#170

Post by barrkel » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 12:23 PM UTC

rusk wrote: post #165

holoduke wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well did you try out Linux bash on windows. In less than 2 minutes you setup a Debian instance. You got shells and everything. All well known ide's are available on both Windows and Mac. In my opinion there is no real difference anymore. I am a Mac user and windows user. The only reason why I still use my Mac is because of the ergonomics.

In my experience Mac OS still has the edge in terms of stability. But certainly the gap is closing.

The only crashes I've had from NT kernel over the past 15 years or so are from graphics card drivers and bad RAM.

Linux is a lot less stable, as a laptop OS, than Windows or OSX. Suspend and resume in presence and absence of multiple monitors is like rolling dice; locks up about 15% of the time.