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Use Zsh

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Re: Use Zsh

#41

Post by r00fus »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #27

This article really feels like bikeshedding to me. I'm always going to use whatever shell comes default with the OS I'm on (which almost always means Bash), simply because changing the shell is an unnecessary block of time that could instead be used writing software. I need a really good reason to switch, something the equivalent of pipes, and if the #1 reason you can give is "Powerful context based tab completion",…

This is the same logic that keeps me from jailbreaking my iPhone - it's possible and fairly straightforward, but eventually some condition (likely an important iOS point release) causes the situation to revert.

f.lux for iOS is tempting me to re-visit this, as it's crucial to me getting a few more Z's at night.

Re: Use Zsh

#42

Post by buster »

Been trying zsh for a while, ran fish for 1 or 2 years. Am back to bash because to many scripts rely on bash and wont't work on zsh or fish.

Thing is, it's note that hard to get the mentioned features in bash. Good tab completion, good git enabled color prompt, ssh completion, host completion, command completion and (my favorite) "start typing, press up, cycle through command history with the given input" aka reverse search. I really really liked fish. But incompatibility with bash was just too annoying after a while.

Re: Use Zsh

#43

Post by oe »

eblume wrote: post #31

I tried using oh-my-zsh, but all of a sudden bringing up a new terminal (on OS X) went from taking ~1 second to ~5 seconds. Totally killed my interest in zsh. I'm sure there's a way to make it all work nicely, but bash has been doing just fine for me, I don't feel the need to figure out an entirely new configuration system for a tool that ultimately has little new utility in my workflow.

Same thing on a year old MBP. I installed the basic Oh My Zsh package and a new terminal sometimes takes 5-10 seconds to initialize. Are there some tricks that would make it faster? I mainly use the Git-plugin.

Re: Use Zsh

#44

Post by [deleted] »

darkstalker wrote: post #37
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #27

This article really feels like bikeshedding to me. I'm always going to use whatever shell comes default with the OS I'm on (which almost always means Bash), simply because changing the shell is an unnecessary block of time that could instead be used writing software. I need a really good reason to switch, something the equivalent of pipes, and if the #1 reason you can give is "Powerful context based tab completion",…

zsh's tab completion is definitely not cosmetic. It can do very useful things like completing scp destination paths over remote hosts.

[deleted]

Re: Use Zsh

#45

Post by darkstalker »

sstephenson wrote: post #22

Here's another perspective: http://sstephenson.us/posts/on-configuration

That's really not relevant for people like me, who works 90% of the time on his local machine. Even if I have to work with remote machines, I always try to sshfs so I can work with the files locally.

Re: Use Zsh

#46

Post by osdf »

eblume wrote: post #31

I tried using oh-my-zsh, but all of a sudden bringing up a new terminal (on OS X) went from taking ~1 second to ~5 seconds. Totally killed my interest in zsh. I'm sure there's a way to make it all work nicely, but bash has been doing just fine for me, I don't feel the need to figure out an entirely new configuration system for a tool that ultimately has little new utility in my workflow.

There is a cleaner 'version' (==fork) of oh-my-zsh that fixed the long startup time for me: https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto. With nice, fast setup (overwrites your .zshrc file!) and lots of documentation.

Re: Use Zsh

#47

Post by zerop »

Not sure if this is good ask. But windows needs a tool like this. Why not have a port for windows as well.

Re: Use Zsh

#48

Post by oinksoft »

fusiongyro wrote: post #9

I used to use zsh but switched back to bash a couple years ago simply because the benefit wasn't worth the trouble. When I first changed back I went to some difficulty to get my PS1 to have color in it. That slowly faded away and now I have a visceral, negative reaction to prompts with that much colorful whizzy fu. Maybe in a few more years I'll trim out the username/hostname/path and become content with just a %.

This is exactly what I've done for the past year. I realized that most of the time, I know which directory I'm in, I know which user I am, and I know which host I'm on. It's trivial to look up any of these (as well as other crazy things people embed in their PS1).

Now my prompt is nothing but a green ">> " on a black background. I'm not deluding myself when I say that the reduced clutter improves my productivity.

Re: Use Zsh

#49

Post by sliverstorm »

sstephenson wrote: post #22

Here's another perspective: http://sstephenson.us/posts/on-configuration

I tend to agree with this perspective, but I've found zsh is still superior, even if you use it just like bash. You could symlink .bashrc to .zshrc, and still enjoy zsh.

(For me, the thing that finally drove me to zsh was bash's unruly handling of prompt wrapping)

Re: Use Zsh

#50

Post by ithcy2 »

zerop wrote: post #47

Not sure if this is good ask. But windows needs a tool like this. Why not have a port for windows as well.

like cygwin zsh? Or are you talking about oh-my-zsh?
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