Is the "hot new thing" status of zsh due to the macos change or is there more going on with other platforms?
I've used both and maybe it's because I'm just not doing anything beyond normal, basic stuff - but I don't see a big difference.
I've used both and maybe it's because I'm just not doing anything beyond normal, basic stuff - but I don't see a big difference.
It's just Apple using zsh as a default shell. People tend to use defaults and a lot more people are exposed to zsh now.
Some developers have found out zsh before apple and customized it extensively. macOS switch just added fuel to the fire.
Then you start to feel insecure thinking it might be too weird and don't try it
Me (using fish): Hmmmmmm....
Hence, I'm on fish.
Combined with starship.rs, it's super easy to get a very nice shell with no config required.
That's a very recent change (1-2 years). ZSH has been extremely popular (and OMZ! etc), for a decade.
The things that got me to try it was being mostly compatible with Bash and having a lot of features that Bash only got later. I remember liking recursive globs, which look like they got added to Bash 4, but my OS may not have had it at the time.
However, when I've asked to colleagues of mine why they used it and how, I've found that nobody knew anything beyond the basics.
I've tried to go beyond the basics myself, but I've found the manuals very obscure, and I gave up. Nowadays I use it for my shell, while I use bash for scripts.
Considering that there's nothing radically better, or at least, that there's nothing radically better _and_ easily accessible, I think that it will always be either a niche, or a tool used in a very basic form. I also think it will realistically never take off in scripting.
I've been trying to stick to literal shell (as in /bin/sh) lately for portability reasons - but every once in a while there's something in bash that makes my life much easier!
Forced it? I've used a custom bash (v. 4) on OS X and not Apple's older bash for a decade or so, and I'm using fish since the last 2 years, not the OS X zsh.
It's trivial to change shell (basically, chsh, as in any Unix).
But there's nothing extremely important about it being GPL3 and not GPL2 (except that it should follow the FSF dictums to the maximum).
Bash an zsh both copied sh and ksh (88) fairly faithfully on old features. Where they diverged on newer things, bash nearly always acquired the feature later than zsh and only very rarely implemented things in a compatible way. Especially for interactive features, I don't think they've seen any need to be compatible. Zsh made more effort on easing things for old tcsh users. It is only on Linux where bash came to be a "default" – if you want pure defaults, see how you enjoy either early sh or a pure POSIX variant as an interactive shell.
Where differences drive you bananas, a little effort to find the right knob to tweak and to stick with it would be rewarded in the long run as you explore the nicer features at your leisure. I'm guessing the asterisks is `setopt NOMATCH` to tweak or, otherwise to understand the benefits of the zsh default.