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Comment by ohgodthecat | Hacker News Reader

Shared history can be either a burden or a godsend, I like it but I usually just end up using whatever basic bash shell I'm on without a custom config as most of the things I do are remote.

The zsh autocorrect works much differently than what you have given. You have shown a feature of ubuntu (and probably debian) that looks for packages matching/close to your given command but what zsh does is give you, depending on your chosen settings, full autocorrect.

Where you may be able to type gut status and get No command found the setup in zsh would allow either for gut status to be autocorrected to git status or would ask you if you meant git status while waiting for a confirmation.

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Zsh has knobs for shared history. You can configure all terminals to have the same history at the same time, but I have it set to add history to the .zsh_history file immediately, but each shell gets it's own history. So ctrl-r in a shell lists commands entered into that shell (or preexisting when it started), and opening a new terminal starts with the shared history from all terminals. This is really the best of both worlds. Also there's a knob to only add a command if it isn't in the history, so no scrolling back over a dozen "cd .." or whatever.

Zsh has floating point math, for instance $((1.0/2)) is 0.5 instead of an error. This comes in handy sometimes in simple scripts.

Zsh is significantly faster.

Zsh autocomplete is much more advanced. Bash may have copied the pid completion and some other easy ones, but zsh has all sorts of completion hooks, for instance "svn help ch<tab>" expands to "changelist". It also runs --help and parses out GNU style help text for completing options.

Zsh completion also has optional Windows-style cycle mode, so you can do "prefix<tab><tab>"... and cycle through the matches instead of prefix<tab>a<tab><tab>b<tab>-<tab>" like in bash. I think you can actually make bash do this but it's some obscure key binding.

...basically zsh is just a bit better at everything.

{edit: oops meant to reply to grandparent}

im pretty sure bash does shared history if you desire it, the configuration is just not as directly obvious.

I prefer a long histfile (unlimited really, i. think i have it set to a million lines, but im at about 70 000. i even keep it backed up regularly because its fairly easy to trash the histfile if you are opening subshells and do the wrongthing. timestamped, too, which i find really handy.

that said, i do use and like zsh on my primary workstation, love it.. but i dont bother priming every other remote box with it, my bash config is simple and tweaked up just rightfor remote servers, and bash is there by default (dealing with older systems, etc.....i know zsh is installed by default often too)

Bash configuration for shared history:

  # Append to ~/.bash_history instead of overwriting it -- this stops terminals
  # from overwriting one another's histories.
  shopt -s histappend
  # Only load the last 1000 lines from your ~/.bash_history -- if you need an
  # older entry, just grep that file.
  HISTSIZE=1000
  # Don't truncate ~/.bash_history -- keep all your history, ever.
  unset HISTFILESIZE
  # Add a timestamp to each history entry.
  HISTTIMEFORMAT="%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S  "
  # Don't remember trivial 1- and 2-letter commands.
  HISTIGNORE=?:??
  # What it says.
  HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
  # Save each history entry immediately (protects against terminal crashes/
  # disconnections, and interleaves commands from multiple terminals in correct
  # chronological order).
  PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

Sorry for being off-topic, but do you know how the ZSH history file gets trashed? It's happened so often to me that I wrote a script to reconstruct my history file by combining the last handful of backups. I still haven't figured out how the history file gets trashed though :-(

Edit: Since I'm in ZSH company, here's the script: https://gist.github.com/1713414

guessing, but could you be invoking zsh in such a way occasionally that it is not reading your .zshrc? sudo or su come to mind..... this is what got me in bash a few times - exiting a shell that had just the wrong ssettings so it ioverwrote my history.

I like a long history too. I actually automatically rotate my history file every quarter (copying over the 500 most recent entries) and keep around my old history files. It's actually come in really handy when I want to do something I last did two years ago.

wow - would you know the settings for the whole shared history thing you wrote about. I have mine set up in a less than ideal way and have never been able to google for these settings.

These are the history setopt's I have, but I don't know if they all make sense with each other though. I set it up once and haven't touched it in years.

HIST_IGNORE_DUPS # don't add multiple 'cd ..', etc in a row?

HIST_EXPIRE_DUPS_FIRST # save unique hist entries longer

HIST_VERIFY # edit recalled history before running

INC_APPEND_HISTORY # add commands to .history immediately

EXTENDED_HISTORY # save timestamp on history entries

# set a huge history... doesn't seem to affect performance at all

HISTFILE=~/.zsh_history

HISTSIZE=10000

SAVEHIST=$((HISTSIZE/2))

For the completion I setopt AUTO_REMOVE_SLASH GLOB_COMPLETE MENU_COMPLETE NO_AUTO_LIST NO_BAD_PATTERN NO_BEEP NO_LIST_AMBIGUOUS NO_LIST_BEEP NO_NOMATCH, but I'm not sure what they all do ;-P

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