Hacker News Reader

Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I must be the only HN person who doesn’t really care what shell I use.

It used to be that I’d end up on older systems with only cshell as the default. So immediately would install bash for what I had expected to be default behavior by that point.

zsh never clicked for me though, until I used oh-my-zsh, which allows for sharing custom extensions from folks. And it’s great, and superior to bash.

I used to not care, but these little improvements are worth it.

+1 on oh-my-zsh

I recommend Oh My Zsh with the zsh-autosuggestions [1] and zsh-syntax-highlighting [2] plugins.

[1] https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions

[2] https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting

And my custom theme ;) https://github.com/whyboris/dotfiles/blob/main/yboris.zsh-th...

hmm, I just added zsh-syntax-highlighting to my plugins and sourced .zshrc and got "[oh-my-zsh] plugin 'zsh-syntax-highlighting' not found" Any ideas?

Installation instructions for the plugin:

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting/blob/ma...

Looks like you need to clone the .git repository into your oh-my-zsh directory

Thanks

I've recently moved over to slimzsh. As the name implies, it is lightweight and fast, but provides all of the modern niceties and defaults that I want.

https://github.com/changs/slimzsh

fancy, with useful plugins. my top pick:

zsh + oh-my-zsh + powerline10k on iterm2

alternative, less fancy, but nice if you want something simple yet decent:

zim on alacritty

I really wonder how much of the zsh "love" comes from two things:

1. it being the new Mac default

2. oh-my-zsh

And if the second is important, I wonder how many people have never tried anything similar for bash, such as https://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash (never used it myself, but it has stars!)

Hm, for me it was oh-my-zsh, no doubt about that, but the change of the default shell on Mac was a pleasant surprise.

It was cool before becoming the default shell on macOS. I’ve been installing it from MacPorts and putting oh-my-zsh for years before it became the default.

I use ZSH only because it's default on my work Macbook, and my workplace's IT provisioning has a bunch of stuff that assumes a default ZSH in place.

However, on my personal machine and at my previous employer, I used a reasonably tweaked oh-my-bash setup and I can't say that I notice much of a daily quality-of-life difference.

If you prefer an POSIX compliance for your interactive shell then I would completely agree with you: it probably doesn't matter which shell you are using. If you don't care about POSIX compliance then there are several options that offer better productivity out-of-the-box (fish and oil are probably the most mature right now).

Props to Oil for the least Googleable project name I've ever seen, btw. Go ahead, try searching for "shell oil" and see if you ever find the open source project. lol

Do you spend most of your days reading from a shell/entering commands in a shell? That might make it more/less likely to care about the tooling you use. I spend a lot of time editing code, so naturally I care about what editor I use. Same with the shell.

I sometimes feel like zsh is one of those things along with tiling WMs that people spend so much time dinking around with the configuration of that any gain in productivity is negated

can be. I never dink, I just update and use it.

I don’t spend hours configuring it: I’ve just put my settings and plugins in a git repo and now I have an identical environment that’s fine-tuned for my uses on any computer I use (but then I don’t use any tiling WM). Clearly for me the initial investment of reading zsh’s documentation thoroughly and playing with a bunch of plugins for an afternoon or two was worth it.

Also remember that productivity is difficult to attribute to a single factor. Just having a more pleasant shell helps staying focused and motivated, even though the settings themselves do not improve efficiency directly.

People dink for fun mostly, or to make the experience more comfortable for them, rather than for productivity

Nope, there's plenty of you. As long as the shell is sufficiently compatible (which often entails being 'bash-compatible'...) and it has the rudimentary CLI features of command history and repetition I don't care either. I just use whatever is the largest common denominator - currently bash - in the knowledge that any scripts I produce are likely to work elsewhere. If it really needs to work everywhere I limit myself to POSIX shell but otherwise I use the handy bits of bash without remorse. If most of the world moves to zsh or Oil shell or Fish then so will I.

Quite the contrary. I haven't seen a single HN thread on zsh that's not full of comments questioning its reason for existence.

Depends what you need I guess. It’s great to tab complete files on a remote host whenn rsyncing to your own machine. Saves a ton of time over the years. Can you live without? Yeah sure but… why? It’s free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com