Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapolone | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention:

- Oh-my-zsh has a lot of plugins for auto-completion

- FZF (fuzzy finder), for command history is a big hit (supports bash too)

I tried using ZSH. My first experience was using a bunch of plugins like zsh spaceship and having the shell slow to a complete halt.

I then used "stock zsh" and running commands was fine except some autocompletes like git-autocomplete were terribly slow and, for example, did not support `git switch`. This broke my workflow and it was easier to just go back to bash than to figure out how zsh works. I found that autocomplete in zsh is a lot more opaque than in bash. I'm sure there are ways to fix it. My way was to switch to bash.

(Now I use magit so the need is lessened.)

> - Oh-my-zsh has a lot of plugins for auto-completion

As does bash-completion, which is available in many (but not all :-/) Linux distros and via Homebrew on MacOS and [pre-dates](https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/tree/09b07d57a7031d9...) [oh-my-zsh](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/tree/5da20b9dddb1f7a91106...) by about 6 years.

But, zsh users and oh-my-zsh fan-boys seem to be entirely ignorant of bash-completion.

I never understand comments like these. Why do you have to twist this to be about "ignorant fan boys"?

Not enough drama in the world already?

Sorry, but I've read too many posts that say "bash sucks, it doesn't do <thing that bash has done for years before zsh did it> like zsh does".

And there's a constructive way to respond to those posts, if you must absolutely respond.

Yours ain't it.

Ironic response.

Fair point

Actually, maybe it's more the fact that at a prominent tech company: * zsh is the default shell on a large proportion of servers that have read-only /home, so you can't easily change to your preferred shell * a training guide that many new developers follows states incorrectly that:

> If you are using Bash and you have the option of using ZSH, you should switch to it. ZSH has additional auto-complete and history features that Bash doesn’t have (but don't worry - those features will not be relevant to this tutorial.)

oh-my-zsh seems to be recommended by a lot of developers in this company, even though: * the default mechanism to install is curl|sh (there is no Homebrew package) on developer machines which have privileged access to a lot of resources * installing it via its recommended installation procedure on dev machines would violate company policies, whereas installing bash-completion wouldn't

Reply on news.ycombinator.com