My personal favorite zsh specific feature is the REPORTTIME environment variable. When set to a nonzero number it'll automatically print a summary after a long running command.
My own http://imgur.com/6LCS1cj
How zsh is more useful than bash
61–70 of 151 posts
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#62WTF?
I wrote this slide deck. It was a presentation I made for a monthly "tech lunch" my team has.
I made it after a couple of weeks of messing with zsh. It was for an audience of 4 other people who knew less about zsh than me. I can't believe someone posted it to HN!
That explains the "this slide deck is getting traffic" email I got from Slideshare this morning.
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#63I like process substitution feature in zsh. In bash you can write: vimdiff And this will create two pipes, where output of each ls will go. Unfortunately, vimdiff sometimes needs to do second pass on the files, so this command won't work properly when outputs are large. But in zsh you can write vimdiff =(ls /bin) =(ls /usr/bin) and this will create temporary normal files, instead of just pipes, and vimdiff will work…
That seems like a good reason for switching to zsh!
Actually I use bash for my daily work, so I run zsh from bash:
zsh -c 'vimdiff =(ls /bin) =(ls /usr/bin)'
A couple of similarly useful features, and I'm swtiching to zsh. But now I am too lazy to make proper configuration.
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#64While zsh may be more 'useful', I find it a bit too smart. Many of the features are very interactive, and introduce a non-determinism that messes up my ability to fix errors. An example is command correction. I (usually) know when a command is wrong, and go to fix it without thinking. Being asked if you really meant some other command interferes with this, and while seemingly helpful, makes you wonder if a shell shou…
The command correction really bugs me in ZSH. 99% of the time it's wrong, and it doesn't learn even after the hundredth time of me telling it "no that's not what I meant, stick with the original". I keep thinking I should try writing a Bayesian filter for it or something, which would be a fun little project, but too low priority.
Also annoying when I start a command with sh, hit tab to command complete it with a .sh script in the current dir, and the command completion shows not just the .sh script but a bunch of shell commands as well. Pretty sure 'sh' should filter all those out and return only 'example.sh'. I don't recall this happening on bash.
Love all the plugins and things like oh-my-zsh, though.
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#65WTF? I wrote this slide deck. It was a presentation I made for a monthly "tech lunch" my team has. I made it after a couple of weeks of messing with zsh. It was for an audience of 4 other people who knew less about zsh than me. I can't believe someone posted it to HN! That explains the "this slide deck is getting traffic" email I got from Slideshare this morning.
I had just switched to zsh and found your deck when searching for something like "zsh features", I thought "hey this is great for starting out with zsh and maybe a good post for HN". Thank you for releasing it for everyone to see.
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#66While zsh may be more 'useful', I find it a bit too smart. Many of the features are very interactive, and introduce a non-determinism that messes up my ability to fix errors. An example is command correction. I (usually) know when a command is wrong, and go to fix it without thinking. Being asked if you really meant some other command interferes with this, and while seemingly helpful, makes you wonder if a shell shou…
I don't use them. But there are similar stupid features in bash which I also don't use. Configuring a shell seems normal to me.
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#67That's actually the first time I've seen a decent set of reasons why zsh is worth using. Well done. Almost every other "Switch from bash to zsh, it has this awesome killer feature" article I've seen has raved about a feature that's available in Bash & has been for years. I'm starting at a new job in a month or so, I shall try & use it as an opportunity to switch to zsh since I won't have any can't-live-without bash s…
You can easily drop your existing BASH aliases, etc, into .zshrc and not even notice that you've switched to zsh.
As for "Oh My Zsh," I've never seen any reason to use it, as zsh works fine without any add-ons.
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's better. What's "better" about it?
1) A pretty great experience even before you start customizing. I only add a git status section to my status line and set some environment variables in my config.fish file. 2) An effort to clean up and orthogonalize shell syntax. The potential portability means I usually still make bash scripts when I'm sharing for others, but for my own stuff it's great. 3) Suggested completions. I start typing a command and if it's…
I don't care about experience before I start customizing because I am very certain that I will want to customize. A smaller configuration file does not benefit me at all.
I don't find zsh to be slow even on an older machine, so I'm puzzled what you mean by that.
Which only leaves the suggestion feature, which is interesting but not enough for me to pick up yet another shell with syntax that is even more different from the rest.
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#69I love using zsh (in combination with oh-my-zsh) on OSX but the only thing I've noticed after using it a year is that it's becoming very very slow. As in, it usually takes me 5-10 seconds to login to a new session (locally) and be able to see the prompt and type something. Tab auto completion takes a second or two (even for files). Combined with the git plugin I have enabled (which does "git status" on every prompt i…
If you like zsh don't go back to bash, just ditch oh-my-zsh and roll your own config gradually, or try prezto (oh-my-zsh fork which pays attention to performance).
Re: How zsh is more useful than bash
#70I see your zsh and I raise you fish: http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/ Try it. It's better.
i just tried fish. out of the box experience is great. not digging much yet but so far, so good. much faster start up time than zsh. this is 2013 already and i seriously dont' want a shell takes up a second or 2 to fire up.
I use zsh on my low-spec netbook and have not noticed slow startup times for my shell.
That said, I do have a minimalist setup.
FreeBSD
DWM
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