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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

> Forcing yourself to always use the lowest common denominator of software is not a fun path.

Second this. Been there, and back, and there again, and recently back again.

Customize the hell out of your shell, make it your place, make it nice. You're spending your day there, every day. Treat it like you'd treat your work desk.

If it's a stranger's machine, well, OK, suffer through the 10 minutes of troubleshooting, an occasional session with busybox also helps keep "pure POSIX" skillset fresh. If you're becoming a regular there, it's time to think how to make your dotfiles portable. google.com/search?q=dotfiles

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While I appreciate your perspective, I think it’s more from the “occasional SSH to a foreign server” mindset. Scaling “the way I work in a shell” to huge fleets is a nonstarter, and as a working SRE, has been the biggest thing holding me back from zsh, fish, and other alternatives.

OTOH, I’m also against, for example, installing zsh fleetwide in production fleets to accommodate choosy folks. So I’m on both ends of the problem, and know it.

- As soon as you have more than 5 boxes, you need different tools for your everyday tasks, interactive SSH sessions just don't work. But you know that already.

- So you've found yourself SSH'ing into a particular box, because that's just the best way to work on a problem. Either it's a pet box (in which case it makes total sense to drop your dotfiles there), or it's a cattle box and you don't care about the trash you left behind, because autoscaling will clean it up for you.

It's actually not that difficult to maintain context if you use completely different shells (with different-looking prompts) on your own machine vs the fleet. It's like code-switching when you talk to your friends at the bar vs co-workers.

My zsh/nvim/... dotfiles are portable and compatible with FreeBSD, macOS and a bunch of Linux distributions, but it's absolutely unacceptable to run those on a machine I don't control. You don't mess with configuration on another guy(ette)'s server.

My setup is customized, but the core experience is kept relatively untouched. If someone experiences a problem, I need to be able to debug it in place efficiently. I write drivers for the company's hardware for a living—troubleshooting takes more than 10 minutes.

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