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Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

I recently (i.e., yesterday) migrated my 15+ year old bash config to zsh. zsh has some great quality of life improvements compared to bash and is basically 1-1 compatible. I had to spend about an hour migrating my prompt, but other than that it was a smooth transition.

zsh is now the default shell in macOS, so I'd say it's a safe bet if that's what you work with.

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I switched a few years ago and while there's a lot to like about (and power in) zsh, there's a lot i really dislike about it. For starters, it adds so much additional functionality and compatibility that the documentation (man pages are terrible). Also, the additional history & variable expansion capabilities are messy/ugly in shell syntax (imho). I think ultimately the problem is that, for shell scripting, bash has clearly won, but other shells show that there's room for an alternative specifically for a user's interactive interface...but zsh didn't get the memo so is trying to be all things to all people. One of these days, i'll probably swing over to fish...if I can get the energy to change my environment yet again.

"basically 1-1 compatible"

careful, there are footguns in those words. It may seem like it's 1-1, but it's not. There are subtle differences especially in escapes. Bash uses \ escapes. Zsh uses % escapes. Zsh has builtin wildcard expansion. There are other differences as well but you can use the emulate command to emulate bash so it actually is 1-1.

Also, once you've made the switch to zsh - checkout oh-my-zsh (https://ohmyz.sh/)

it's pretty funny that Zsh only came out one year after Bash... in 1990

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