Worth switching to zsh for casual use? [closed]

192
votes

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 :) )

@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?

6
bashshellzsh
Since zsh is (almost) a superset of bash, you can start with moving to zsh and using it like bash. Then you can learn the zsh gems a little bit at a time. – orip
If you have a bit of bash customization and you often use the shell inside of emacs, this does not seem trivial. I posted related question: stackoverflow.com/questions/13326879/… – justingordon
The only thing I dislike about zsh is that (at least on Ubuntu) you'll have to configure it yourself the first time you start it (instead of it providing some sane defaults that you can later on tinker with). If you can get over that, zsh is the best! – zrajm

6 Answers

70
votes

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.

85
votes

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!

38
votes

Switch to zsh. You will have access to:

  1. zmv: You can do: zmv '(*).mp3' '$1.wma' for thousands of files.
  2. zcalc: Extremely comfortable calculator, better than bc.
  3. zparseopts: One-liner for parsing arbitrary complex options given to your script.
  4. autopushd: You can always do popd after cd to change back to your previous directory.
  5. Floating point support. It is needed from time to time.
  6. Hashes support. Sometimes they are just a key feature.
13
votes

If all you want to use ZSH for is better completion, the configuration is pretty easy. Place this in your ~/.zshrc:

autoload -U zutil      # [1]
autoload -U compinit   # [2]
autoload -U complist   # [3]
compinit

However, it's worth checking out all the other great features of the ZSH. The above example will give you a pretty plain prompt with good completion. If you don't want to fiddle with configurations, but want to see what ZSH can do for you, Google for "zshrc" and you will get some ready to use configurations to get started.

6
votes

zsh has a console gui configuration thing. You can set it up pretty quickly and easily without having to fiddle with configuration files. I don't think you will need much time to set it up, probably 10 seconds with just using defaults, so go ahead and try it out.

3
votes

Staale is talking about a wizard like program (CUI) which autoruns the first time you run zsh. Just answer some questions, view/change the defaults and its configured for you.

IBM developerWorks has great resources on zsh.

I have not used very advanced features and so far I have not come across serious differences which should hamper someone coming from bash.

Some examples:

  • !?pattern<Tab> will autocomplete to the last command in history matching pattern. Very useful.

  • You can configure a prompt on the RHS. One use is to keep a fixed width prompt on the left hand side so all commands line up nicely while displaying the pwd (or anything of variable width) as the right hand side prompt.

  • You can redirect input from multiple files (yet to try this): cat < file1 < file2 < file3