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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

That says a thing or too about habits. Was he pissed or was it just a light comment ?

I'd be sad to see an educated person refuse interesting new tricks (readline causes no regression or loss right ?)

It's delicate. The noob me chased after new tricks with much more enthusiasm than the current me. Over time, priorities change, and now I just want to get stuff done and for tools to get out of the way. I'd appreciate new tricks that bring quite a lot of benefit to my workflow, but the little tricks I'd rather let fly past me.

If the tools such as base environment changes way too often, I'd be annoyed as well - not because I don't know how to make the colours go away or set up the proper aliases - but the fact that I need to do it and pause my actual work.

I totally understand that, I'm not a young mind anymore, and I get that most of these are pointless superficial tricks. I spend most of my days venting about the state of computing (especially since web2.0 came and replaced a lot of stuff with bloated regressions in many offices)

But I considered readline a good addition, not a waste of time and neurons.

ps: I stopped using zsh/fish, my emacs theme is the vanilla theme.. you forget about these 'improvements', for real tasks they don't matter.

I work half as fast without fish completions. matters to some people

Fish truly is superior for productivity.

It has its downsides unfortunately.

Maybe I shouldn't have included this comment after the `pointless superficial tricks` :)

It is one of the saddest self-realizations in my old age that I am no longer excited about learning/perfecting my tools.

But as you say, tools must get out of the way...

he was pissed! and, really didn't like terminal colors when you ran 'ls' (so I showed how to unalias ls)

At this point I don't want to learn any new tricks, either. I'm sticking with bash for the rest of my life.

what kind of research ? was it computing related or something really different ?

I'm quite shocked

I'm not 20 something either, I'm not chasing new shiny.. but a simple history access (arrows or search) is not an invasive disruptive toy feature..

alas

biomedical research, but the person I was helping "had written a kernel disk driver for VAX BSD back in the 80s" and I think they wanted things to more or less stay the same as BSD in the 80s. Which, as far as wishes go, isn't terrible.

yeah I guess he earned the right to have his ways :)

I've been trying to stick with bash for at least 20 years (I did have a brief tcsh phase before that) since a time when sticking with it meant having to install it on every unix system I touched. However, now that MacOS defaults to zsh, I'm starting to wonder if I should summon up the effort to change again.

I think the most noticeable difference is that `$foo` doesn't word-split unless you do `${=foo}`. Beyond that, I don't think one would notice they were using zsh instead of bash. In most ways, zsh is pretty much a superset of bash.

personally, I don't have interest in zsh because bash is the default shell in Linux, which is the UNIX system I use (I find mac's unix to be really a weird variant). Mac switching to zsh is just more evidence they're diverting from the mainstream.

> I find mac's unix to be really a weird variant

It's closer to BSD than it is to Linux. Not super similar, but closer, especially in ways one tends to notice on the command line.

It still sticks pretty close to BSD. I am seeing a ton of (entirely natural) similarity since I started seriously playing with FreeBSD

you're right, Mac OS X is a derivative of BSD but it also has significant Mach tech (like the linker).

I've used freebsd for years and I still find Mac OS to be the least useful UNIX.

Ironic it's one of the few (only?) popular, widely deployed ones left that gets to sport the fact it's a certified Unix OS - https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

Sort of. I see this a different way. Many years ago, Linux replaced UNIX as the "standard UNIX", and certification become irrelevant.

Further, unless I'm missing an important technical detail, Linux could, with some effort, pass the certification process.

Apple switched to zsh because newer versions of bash are licensed under GPLv3.

I know what the reason is. I don't care. I use GPLv3 and have no interest in an OS that doesn't. You can run bash on windows or compile it yourself on any platform. microsoft even distributes it with windows.

Not strictly correct. It's provided by whatever WSL distro you download, and that download comes from the distro as opposed to Microsoft.

Compile it yourself on MacOS, problem solved. Or install it with Homebrew?

IIRC, MacOS had to ship with a fairly old version of bash by default because newer versions have a more copyleft license; I always assumed that their swap to zsh was because they wanted something both up to date and compatible in terms of the license (and the fact that most bash "just works" when you run it in zsh is a plus).

macOS is about as standard of a Unix as you can get, apart from Linux with coreutils.

I would guess that he was mostly pissed that things "just changed" without being asked. While these sort of things like the up arrow seem like a no-brainer to many here, showing up for work on Monday and having everything just be different sucks. It's a bad experience, and I can't really blame him for being annoyed.

A lot of times people would be a lot more receptive if you show them "hey, you can use the up arrow like so if you want!" Then they can choose and adapt at their own pace if they want to, and they're in control of their own systems.

I told him (this guy was the chair of the informatics department at a major biomedical company) that I understood if he didn't like color ls, because it could be hard to see some colors on a terminal, but that if he wanted to disable arrow key history he was just crazy. Some things are just progress.

As always, there's an xkcd on this

https://xkcd.com/1172/

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