Worth switching to zsh for casual use? [closed]

Question

The default shell in Mac OS X is bash, which I'm generally happy to be using. I just take it for granted. It would be really nice if it auto-completed more stuff, though, and I've heard good things about zsh in this regard. But I don't really have the inclination to spend hours fiddling with settings to improve my command line usage by a tiny amount, since my life on the command line isn't that bad.

(As I understand it, bash can also be configured to auto-complete more cleverly. It's the configuring I'm not all that keen on.)

Will switching to zsh, even in a small number cases, make my life easier? Or is it only a better shell if you put in the time to learn why it's better? (Examples would be nice, too :) )

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@Rodney Amato & @Vulcan Eager give two good reasons to respectively stick to bash and switch to zsh. Looks like I'll have to investigate both! Oh well :)

Is there anyone with an opinion from both sides of the argument?

Answer 1

Personally, I love zsh.

Generally, you probably won't notice the difference between it and bash, until you want to quickly do things like recursive globbing:

• **/*.c for example.

Or use suffix aliases to associate specific progs with different suffixes, so that you can "execute" them directly. The below alias lets you "run" a C source file at the prompt by simply typing ./my_program.c – which will work exactly as if you typed vim ./my_program.c. (Sort of the equivalent to double clicking on the icon of a file.)

• alias -s c=vim

Or print the names of files modified today:

• print *(e:age today now:)

You can probably do all of these things in bash, but my experience with zsh is that if there's something I want to do, I can probably find it in zsh-lovers. I also find the book 'From Bash to Z-Shell' really useful.

Playing with the mind bogglingly large number of options is good fun too!

Answer 2

For casual use you are probably better off sticking with bash and just installing bash completion.

Installing it is pretty easy, grab the bash-completion-20060301.tar.gz from http://www.caliban.org/bash/index.shtml#completion and extract it with

tar -xzvf bash-completion-20060301.tar.gz 

then copy the bash_completion/bash_completion file to /etc with

sudo cp bash_completion/bash_completion /etc 

which will prompt you for your password. You probably will want to make a /etc/bash_completion.d directory for any additional completion scripts (for instance I have the git completion script in there).

Once this is done the last step is to make sure the .bash_profile file in your home directory has

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then      . /etc/bash_completion  fi 

in it to load the completion file when you login.

To test it just open a new terminal, and try completing on cvs and it should show you the cvs options in the list of completions.