Live data from Hacker News

Zshell

zsh.org

1–10 of 37 posts

Re: Zshell

#2
Needs a (1990) tag. It always amuses me when people, to this day, say "eh, not going to use that newfangled zsh, bash was good enough for my forefathers and is good enough for me" - not realizing zsh was released less than a year after bash.

Re: Zshell

#3
post #2

Needs a (1990) tag. It always amuses me when people, to this day, say "eh, not going to use that newfangled zsh, bash was good enough for my forefathers and is good enough for me" - not realizing zsh was released less than a year after bash.

I tried to give zsh a shot as a bash replacement but ultimately returned to bash.

My main pain point was that zsh was really difficult to configure out of the box and a lot of the completions were much slower (cpu/wall time) than the equivalent completion in bash.

I'm sure some of that was simply ignorance on my part.

Re: Zshell

#4
post #2

Needs a (1990) tag. It always amuses me when people, to this day, say "eh, not going to use that newfangled zsh, bash was good enough for my forefathers and is good enough for me" - not realizing zsh was released less than a year after bash.

Personally, I don’t have a reason to move from bash. Bash, zsh, fish looks very similar to me. But they do have subtle differences that require learning. And I don’t see a point.

Re: Zshell

#5
post #2

Needs a (1990) tag. It always amuses me when people, to this day, say "eh, not going to use that newfangled zsh, bash was good enough for my forefathers and is good enough for me" - not realizing zsh was released less than a year after bash.

Personally, I don’t have a reason to move from bash. Bash, zsh, fish looks very similar to me. But they do have subtle differences that require learning. And I don’t see a point.

The only reason I moved to zsh is because I'm lazy, and macOS ships with it by default.

Easier to change my other systems to zsh than fight it, but I've not really done anything different except some minor notices that it seems to autocomplete a tiny bit better (but that may be due to oh my zsh).

Re: Zshell

#6
I like the path completion in zsh, being able to type '~/.c/x/x', hit tab and have it autocomplete to '~/.config/xsettingsd/xsettingsd.conf' is a lot nicer than `~/.c', tab, tab, add an 'o', tab again, 'x', tab, tab, 's', tab, tab.

Re: Zshell

#8
post #3
post #2

Needs a (1990) tag. It always amuses me when people, to this day, say "eh, not going to use that newfangled zsh, bash was good enough for my forefathers and is good enough for me" - not realizing zsh was released less than a year after bash.

I tried to give zsh a shot as a bash replacement but ultimately returned to bash. My main pain point was that zsh was really difficult to configure out of the box and a lot of the completions were much slower (cpu/wall time) than the equivalent completion in bash. I'm sure some of that was simply ignorance on my part.

Bash improved a lot since the early 2000s, when I first assessed my options for shells and settled on zsh. As an interactive shell, zsh did more, and better, than any other shell I tried. Maybe it was slow, but not enough to matter at the time I used it.

I guess that bash being the default practically everywhere nowadays made it so that it got a lot of love. For example, it is common to see command line tool come with bash completion files, less so with zsh.

Also, while bash got better support where it matters, zsh mostly got bloat in the form of oh-my-zsh and the likes. You don't have to use it, but if you do, you tend to have all kinds of fancy stuff that affects performance. Also, if you want something fancy, you have fish now.

I still use zsh (without oh-my-zsh) out of habit, but if I had to start over now, I would probably stay with bash, or maybe use fish, but not zsh.

Re: Zshell

#9
Somewhat related is "Oh My ZSH!" which is basically zsh on steroids, it's always one of the first things I install on a new computer. It gives things like new colors, themes, plugins, and more. Highly recommend you check it out.

https://ohmyz.sh/

Re: Zshell

#10
post #6

I like the path completion in zsh, being able to type ' ~/.c/x/x ', hit tab and have it autocomplete to ' ~/.config/xsettingsd/xsettingsd.conf ' is a lot nicer than ` ~/.c ', tab, tab, add an 'o', tab again, 'x', tab, tab, 's', tab, tab.

I’ve been using zsh for a while now and you just blew my mind!
Post reply on HN