What's your shell?


  

21 members have voted

  1. 1. Which shell do you use?

    • Bourne-again shell (bash)
    • Debian Almquist shell (dash)
    • Korn shell (ksh)
      0
    • Z shell (zsh)
    • Friendly interactive shell (fish)
      0
    • C shell (csh or tcsh)
      0
    • Other (specify)
      0


Recommended Posts

As a lifelong bash user, I recently discovered the beauty of zsh. It's weird that I'd come to sort of assume that bash was the cutting edge, but zsh is so much more advanced (if a bit of a pig to set up initially).

So on that, what is everyone else using?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I love bash, Been working with it / learning it for 5 years.

 

But I have been meaning to try other shells. What would you guys recommend? I would like to try out Dash,ZSH, and fish but I dont know "what to google" for a good start.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I found zsh to be very easy to install. For me on arch it was literally just "pacman -S zsh", and it installed. Because it's not your default shell though you have to launch it. So open a terminal, and then type "zsh" as your first command.

The first time you start zsh it'll run you through the basic configuration options (although it's all a bit technical) and let you set up all kinds of advanced tab-completion options and stuff. Then you can try it and if you're happy with it you can use the "chsh" command to set it as the default shell.

The Arch wiki has a fairly decent article on setting up zsh, and I'd recommend having a read if you're interested. They also have an article on Fish, although it doesn't go into as much depth.

TL;DR Install a new shell using apt-get/pacman/yum/whatever, and run it from inside a terminal by running the shell command manually. If you like it, set it as default, otherwise, uninstall it.

e.g.

post-125341-0-59837200-1373153561.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you. I figured it was just another package, but I wanted to make sure I could play around with it before making it my permanent shell.

Good thing is, since im in IT, I can build another arch build on our esxi host or one of my work towers and play around with zsh.

Excited for work on monday now XD

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Last summer I decided that I had heard enough people praise ZSH and talk about its advantages over BASH that I would try it. I liked it. It became my default shell for a short while. There were a few adjustments I had to make, such as tab-completion, but it was a fairly easy adjustment. I experimented with ZSH scripting and customizing my shell. Unfortunately most of the Linux machines I use, apart from my own, do not have ZSH installed, and it took a little adjustment for me to use them after living in ZSH. Also, my newer shell scripts obviously didn't work on machines without ZSH installed. I learned that I can script everything I wrote in ZSH in BASH, some of it is just a little more cumbersome. Therefore I switched my default shell back to BASH and have been using it ever since.

 

In short, ZSH is really nice. It could work for you, and I highly recommend that you try it. I just don't use it anymore.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Last summer I decided that I had heard enough people praise ZSH and talk about its advantages over BASH that I would try it. I liked it. It became my default shell for a short while. There were a few adjustments I had to make, such as tab-completion, but it was a fairly easy adjustment. I experimented with ZSH scripting and customizing my shell. Unfortunately most of the Linux machines I use, apart from my own, do not have ZSH installed, and it took a little adjustment for me to use them after living in ZSH. Also, my newer shell scripts obviously didn't work on machines without ZSH installed. I learned that I can script everything I wrote in ZSH in BASH, some of it is just a little more cumbersome. Therefore I switched my default shell back to BASH and have been using it ever since.

 

In short, ZSH is really nice. It could work for you, and I highly recommend that you try it. I just don't use it anymore.

I think that's fair. I haven't really looked at any zsh scripting yet, but I don't think I'd start using it over bash for scripting. Bash is pretty much guaranteed to be installed, so I think if you're writing a script for distribution, bash is the way to go. Compatability over preference and so on.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally started with Bourne back with Microsoft Xenix, switched over Bash in the mid 90's and stuck with it ever since.  Never had much need/desire to try something different.  It works, don't find it really lacking anything, so I don't see a switch in the forseeable future. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I use bash mainly because I focus on GNU/Linux when it comes to POSIX systems and I don't see the need to try others as they're just variations of the typical text-scraping shells.

 

If PowerShell was a serious proposition on those systems, I'd switch in a flash.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If PowerShell was a serious proposition on those systems, I'd switch in a flash.

 

I find that very surprising. When Microsoft first introduced PowerShell, I thought it looked interesting, but I didn't really look into it until they introduced Windows Server Core and started to make a serious investment into PowerShell server administration. I read the book Windows PowerShell in Action, Second Edition to learn more about it. The book provided an interesting insight into the reasons behind the PowerShell design decisions as well as a good reference on how to use it. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning PowerShell. Although I now understand how to use PowerShell and why Microsoft designed it like it is, I still find it far inferior to BASH. One of the most powerful aspects of traditional UNIX shells, including BASH, is their text orientation. Although Microsoft started by implementing part of the POSIX shell specification, they decided to utilize .NET to allow PowerShell to deal with objects rather than just pure text. Not only does that decision negate the beauty and simplicity of the "universal interface", but it also adds significant overhead to the shell. Therein lies one of my biggest complains with PowerShell: it is slow and unintuitive. While Microsoft had the chance with PowerShell to make the command-line a first-class citizen in Windows, they failed. I much prefer using BASH in Cygwin to PowerShell.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.