OK, I've given it a good whole year. I'm calling it: zsh's supposed benefits don't justify the move from bash. I'm gonna get the latest bash and go back to using that.
Important to recall that the real main supposed advantage is that it's licensing better suits our Cupertino overlords.
@carlton What's the benefit of sticking to bash? Asking as I'm not seeing much difference myself...
Zsh won me over mainly thanks to oh-my-zsh and its plugin system
@carlton I never switched either. I use the homebrew version. Apple business reasons don’t impact my decisions after 27(ish) years of usage.
@carlton interesting. I had moved to zsh well before apple did. Prior to that I was using fish and switched to zsh because of its (better) compatibility with bash. I don't think I could do without two zsh plugins which I wanted coming from fish:
- https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
- https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
Perhaps there's something similar for bash but when I searched years ago I didn't find anything.
@carlton @benfalk the single thing that makes me want to write scripts in Zsh rather than Bash is how Zsh handles line numbers. Basically: correctly. Bash will give you wrong numbers in complex commands. That makes it impossible to write a coverage tool for Bash, in Bash. While it's possible in Zsh :) Well, Zsh is still lacking a ZSH_XTRACEFD feature like Bash has...
For the command line, I'm currently using Zsh but honestly Bash is just as good. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't switch back ^^
@webology 💯 but I’m glad I gave it a try. Eases any FOMO 😜
Im still brew free on the new machine, so I’ll be building my own. I might have to upload it to GH for others to grab. (All 3 of us not using Homebrew 😅)
@carlton plus zsh being installed means nothing is going to break if I run a script with zsh. So there really is not a compelling reason. Starship solved my prompt woes/envy so that’s worth adopting. A
@carlton it's nice and it works with almost any shell so you can try out fish and whatever-else-comes-next for a few minutes without losing your nice shell.
I suspect if you try it, you won't look back.
@erinrachel @carlton maybe I'm a generic shell user, but I don't see any meaningful difference between bash and zsh.
I resisted until I got a new Mac and then I thought I’d give it a fair go.
Conclusion is, the little paper cut differences just don’t pay for themselves.
(Analogy is “I’ll just do that one endpoint in Y, when rest of app is in X”.)
@mike @erinrachel little weird differences that pop up when you’re not looking. Just not worth it, because as you say, there aren’t significant actual differences
@carlton ? That’s the reason? Is there a handy link you know of explaining this more? I was surprised by the decision and this makes more sense than some marginal developer happiness reason.
FWIW, I’ve been using zpresto for years and it basically gives me most of niceties of fish I like, without the compatibility questions
@mrchrisadams Well, there's no official but this kind of thing is the common take:
> Apple hasn’t explained exactly why it’s making this change, but …Apple is stuck using version 3.2 of bash that has been licensed under GPLv2, as newer versions are licensed under GPLv3.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651872/apple-macos-catalina-zsh-bash-shell-replacement-features
"zpresto" — I shall have a look. Ta!