On 'oh-my-zsh' | Hacker News Reader

On 'oh-my-zsh'

wrappedthoughts.heroku.com

3 pointsdain4 comments

I have yet to find zsh worth the fuss of learning.

I tried Oh-my-zsh for a while. I hated its long start-up times every time you login. The constant "update me!" yipping drove me crazy. A shell is supposed to stay out of your way and be useful, not pop up questions that have nothing to do with your present task.

As to the "nothing to learn". Pfft. Plenty to learn or you aren't really using zsh. The shortcuts mentioned are just aliases. You can get them in Bash just as easily:

  alias l="ls -G -la"
  alias ..="cd .."
  alias ...="cd ../.."
  alias ~="cd ~"

Yes, zsh does have some neat things that bash does not (like right-side prompts) but it's not enough, in my book, to grow attached to a shell that you aren't necessarily going to find on all terminals. Bash is everywhere and very powerful.

And as for a plug-in framework with most of the same stuff as oh-my-zsh, there is bash-it: http://thechangelog.com/post/1253059801/bash-it-a-community-...

I understand what you are saying, but have yet to encounter any of the same problems. I didn't know I could create aliases in bash though, so that really invalidates that portion of my article. Thanks for pointing that out. I will certainly look into that, and if I have any of the same problems I will certainly think about just switching back to bash and using aliases.

One thing I love about zsh that I think bash doesn't have is shared history between terminals. Nothing groundbreaking but it's great if you have multiple terminals enabled.

Also, autocompletion in zsh is vastly superior, especially with options to commands.

Gray text on white - please don't do it.

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