Ask HN: What's your favorite shell? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your favorite shell?

6 pointssnihalani10 comments

Hi, I am a bash user and I am looking for better shells. What's your favorite shell? Share your .xxxxrc file if you can. Thanks.

View on HN

cmd.exe

Yes really! I prefer its for loops over those of bash: filenames with spaces are no problem . I prefer they way it assembles environment variables: it is easy to put quotes and spaces in them. Tab completion is better: again filenames with spaces plus looping through matches (which I have just discovered bash can do too).

A set of unix/GNU tools does improve it further. I'm just sorry that it costs so much money.

is this a joke? I think it is. But anyway, cmd.exe is, to put it mildly, crap compared to any other shell. When were filenames with spaces ever a good idea?

try writing your own server with cmd.exe (bash can do it in 164 lines see: https://github.com/sayanriju/Tiny-Bash-Server/blob/master/us... ).

bash

Nothing special in my .bashrc, just whatever came with lubuntu. Here are the only interesting tweaks. The prompt is two lines, first line = $? from the previous command, then some normal stuff; second line is whatever you type for a command, allows triple clicking and just get the command with no prompt cruft.

  ...
  if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
      PS1="\[\033[01;32m\]\$?] ${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;34m\]\u\[\033[01;32m\]@\h\[\033[00m\] \[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\] \$\n"
  else
      PS1="\$?] ${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h \w \$\n"
  fi
  unset color_prompt force_color_prompt
  ...
  export PAGER=~/bin/vimpager

My .inputrc, allows any readline enabled prog like pgsql to have command line editing and completion:

  set editing-mode vi
  set completion-ignore-case on
  Control-j: menu-complete
  Control-k: menu-complete-backward
  set completion-map-case on

In general, don't use set -o vi on the cmd line or in .bashrc, use .inputrc so that everyone who can play does play.

My favourite is actually bash. I've looked at zsh for a while and found nothing I needed that bash didn't already provide. My bashrc just features aliases to a couple of things I often do, and that's basically that.

Bash is actually suprisingly powerful. You might want to have a look at the Bash Reference manual over at gnu.org.

ksh, fast. Though my argument used to be that it was more common across platforms that is not so. Still prefer it over bash and the like but that maybe more to do with me loving to type: set -o vi. I tend not to do startup configuration/customisations much as it's easier moving between different computers/enviroments etc. So many times found myself doing some funky changes and alias's and scripts and then feel a little lost on some virgin system elesewere. I also think ksh is faster than bash though thesedays moot. That all said I'm starting to think about writing my own shell, only way to customise. Probably start by hacking around one of the current ones and then play around with few others to get a nice feel to the various approach's and what I like and don't like better into something code quatifiable.

ksh - I feel I may be amongst a small but proud crowd.

zsh with oh-my-zsh. It has all the features I need, easy to install and update and an active community. Check out the github repo https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/oh-my-zsh

I've used bash all my life, but I am hooked on to fish's fish shell right now (http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/). The command prediction and auto-complete is amazing.

What is it about bash specifically that isn't satisfying your needs?

zsh with my config and some code form oh-my-zsh is awesome my zsh rc code — Gist -> https://gist.github.com/3179783

bash on mingw. I've got a few aliases for things like code scanners and custom tools. I use Komodo Edit as my editor but bash is very much my IDE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com