Use Zsh

http://fendrich.se/blog/2012/09/28/no/

by daivd • 14 years ago

164 114 14 years ago

fendrich.se

adambratt• 14 years ago

Been meaning to start using it for a while. You convinced me to download it and see what all the fuss was over.

Couldn't be happier!

daivd3• 14 years ago

Great!

ludwigvan• 14 years ago

> In Bash, we often use PgUp to search through the command history. In Zsh you just write part of the command and press Up. This will let you cycle through all command lines that contain what you have written, not just those that begins with it. If you don’t write anything Up works as usual, by cycling through all commands.

This is not true, you can do that in Bash too (via .inputrc) http://blog.theliuy.com/2011/inputrc-keyboard-mapping-config...

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood though, does pressing Up really let you search all command lines that contain what you have written, not just those that begins with it? It doesn't seem to do that on my zsh.

daivd3• 14 years ago

Yeah, I thought as much. I just mentioned it to help a new user, because the standard in Bash seems to be PgUp and beginning-of-line search, while in Zsh it is Up and full search.

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

In bash, I press ctrl-r and then enter part of the command. additional ctrl-r's cycle.

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Zsh does that as well with the same exact shortcut

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

It depends on which completion type you want to use. Zsh can do either.

mathieuh• 14 years ago

Any one else using Fish?

nagisa• 14 years ago

Me. Just came to tell, that it's even better than zsh, but ultimately it's a matter of preference.

slurgfest4• 14 years ago

What are your top reasons to use fish over zsh? (Bearing in mind, of course, that it's ultimately a matter of preference...)

fusiongyro4• 14 years ago

I used to use zsh but switched back to bash a couple years ago simply because the benefit wasn't worth the trouble. When I first changed back I went to some difficulty to get my PS1 to have color in it. That slowly faded away and now I have a visceral, negative reaction to prompts with that much colorful whizzy fu. Maybe in a few more years I'll trim out the username/hostname/path and become content with just a %.

slurgfest4• 14 years ago

It faded away because it was too difficult to get the prompt working?

fusiongyro4• 14 years ago

When you have access to a lot of machines run by different organizations but not administration privileges on most of them, it's a hassle.

slurgfest4• 14 years ago

This was an honest question to clarify what was meant by faded away... I appreciated the response... what is the problem? Sheesh

oinksoft2• 14 years ago

This is exactly what I've done for the past year. I realized that most of the time, I know which directory I'm in, I know which user I am, and I know which host I'm on. It's trivial to look up any of these (as well as other crazy things people embed in their PS1).

Now my prompt is nothing but a green ">> " on a black background. I'm not deluding myself when I say that the reduced clutter improves my productivity.

moe• 14 years ago

To each their own. I'm logged in to at least 5 different hosts at any given time, often many more. Without user/hostname in the prompt and the term-title I'd be completely lost.

brcrth• 14 years ago

No, really. Use what you like/know. I hate posts about "you should use X because I like it".

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

meta: I hate posts about "you should hate this post because I don't like it" :)

notJim• 14 years ago

How do you ever learn anything or improve your workflow if you never try new things?

Alan01252• 14 years ago

Just started using Zsh. I never really had any qualms with bash, and so had the mantra if it's not broke don't fix it.

Then I worked with a couple of junior developers and noticed them doing some cool looking things on the terminal.

Suffice to say I've now switched to Zsh and can't see myself going back to bash any time soon. Thanks junior devs :)

redsymbol• 14 years ago

I've been using zsh for over ten years. Since one of my best friends (now a computational physicist) convinced me to try it in college.

Over time I've temporarily switched to others just to make sure I wasn't being stuck in a rut, but I always have come back to zsh. It's a joy to use as a day to day command line interface.

For writing shell scripts, i.e. actual software implemented in shell, I actually prefer bash. In large part because it's more portable, in the sense that any given machine is likely to have bash already installed.

dbbolton2• 14 years ago

If you really want your scripts to be portable, you should probably write them in POSIX sh. There might be a high probability that any given machine with a Unix-like operating system will have bash installed, but it is essentially guaranteed that it will have sh.

However, if a person really wants to run your scripts, he can probably install the interpreter for which they were written.

So choosing bash as some sort of middle-ground isn't really justifiable.

goldfeld• 14 years ago

When it probably covers mostly all computers that will run your script, I don't see why it isn't a good compromise.

jamo• 14 years ago

dawg, where isn't bash these days?

lurker14• 14 years ago

As someone who used zsh for a while but got tired of setting it up everywhere I go and losing the "local community" bash stuff, I humbly request:

someone please post a rebuttal showing how to do all this in bash with appropriate .bashrc/functions and utility programs like fasd.

lloeki• 14 years ago

In spirit, here's mine [0], where I maintain a configuration that works in a similar way for both bash and zsh and does not try to make one identical the other[1]. It respects login vs interactive, and is reasonably fast on start (i have a few ideas to make it faster).

It's designed to be lean, DRY, simple and modular. You can use it as is, overwriting you own dotfiles with setup.sh, or you can pick-source each file/feature you want individually (some need a couple vars set, grep for DOTFILES_).

It leverages available software but tries not to break when it's not available. It works under both Linux and OSX.

It includes an implementation of something like vcs_info for bash, leading to a much more configurable PS1 than git's provided bash prompt support.

Its prompt tries to use colors semantically, and keeps things logical and non-cluttered.

If this reads like this is the best thing since slice bread, that's because it is! ... for me. But I'm sure you could find a useful thing or two in there.

[0] https://github.com/lloeki/dotfiles

[1] I went all the way to hack support of right prompting and reverse-% cleanup on non-newlined output in bash. It works well... most of the time, but when it breaks it's ugly so I just disabled it.

zecho• 14 years ago

Not much of a rebuttal, but certainly a counter to oh-my-zsh: https://github.com/revans/bash-it (which includes fasd).

grandalf2• 14 years ago

just installed zsh but now my rvm is broken, any quick tips? tried adding the following to .zshrc but it doesn't appear to have fixed the issue:

  if [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] ; then source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ; fi

jolan• 14 years ago

Are you using 1.16.x? The changelog mentions improved zsh support.

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/rvm-1-16/

grandalf2• 14 years ago

Got it figured out, turns out .rvm/bin ended up in PATH which screwed it up.

sstephenson• 14 years ago

Here's another perspective: http://sstephenson.us/posts/on-configuration

Apreche2• 14 years ago

I independently wrote pretty much the same post.

http://www.apreche.net/dont-change-the-computer-change-yours...

darkstalker3• 14 years ago

Probably you used Linux at the time it wasn't very mature. I'm running Gentoo now and never had to reinstall to fix things. With modern computers compiling is very fast, most software compiles in less than a minute. I spend more time solving binary compatibility problems with CentOS (at work) than compiling stuff via portage.

I recently bought a new video card (nvidia), plugged it and then booted linux. It just worked out of the box. Then I proceeded to boot windows, it started on a low resolution video mode because the current driver failed. So had to download and install latest drivers manually. The whole procedure took like 3 or 4 restarts.

achille2• 14 years ago

I can't provide source right now, but Microsoft pretty much said the same thing when they updated handwriting recognition for Windows Tablet PC Edition.

In the past they'd go through a procedure where they would learn how you write.

But later on, they decided it was most effective for you to learn to write in a way that the handwriting recognition software would understand.

driverdan• 14 years ago

I'm curious why you choose Windows over OS X. I went from Windows, to Linux, to OS X. To me OS X is an alternative to Linux that just works. I still have a proper shell without resorting to virtualization and splitting systems.

juddlyon• 14 years ago

I needed to read that, thank you.

danielweber• 14 years ago

This is a classic struggle. I remember having it with someone back in the mid 90's -- "isn't it great to customize your session?" I argued.

I'll mess with colors to help my brain visually sort tasks, but I've abandoned so many configurations over the years it's less brain drag to just use what's there.

darkstalker3• 14 years ago

That's really not relevant for people like me, who works 90% of the time on his local machine. Even if I have to work with remote machines, I always try to sshfs so I can work with the files locally.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

I tend to agree with this perspective, but I've found zsh is still superior, even if you use it just like bash. You could symlink .bashrc to .zshrc, and still enjoy zsh.

(For me, the thing that finally drove me to zsh was bash's unruly handling of prompt wrapping)

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

This article really feels like bikeshedding to me. I'm always going to use whatever shell comes default with the OS I'm on (which almost always means Bash), simply because changing the shell is an unnecessary block of time that could instead be used writing software. I need a really good reason to switch, something the equivalent of pipes, and if the #1 reason you can give is "Powerful context based tab completion", I'm confident in dismissing zsh as a cosmetic improvement on bash that I don't need to waste my time on.

rimantas• 14 years ago

How much software can you write in three seconds?

untog• 14 years ago

How many computers do you use? Having to switch between zsh and bash mentally when you from your dev box to a server can be jarring. For some people it's worth it, for others it isn't.

darkstalker3• 14 years ago

zsh's tab completion is definitely not cosmetic. It can do very useful things like completing scp destination paths over remote hosts.

ithcy24• 14 years ago

This has been done by bash_completion for years.

akrito• 14 years ago

Just like bash.

r00fus• 14 years ago

This is the same logic that keeps me from jailbreaking my iPhone - it's possible and fairly straightforward, but eventually some condition (likely an important iOS point release) causes the situation to revert.

f.lux for iOS is tempting me to re-visit this, as it's crucial to me getting a few more Z's at night.

aerique• 14 years ago

Meanwhile I've been enjoying a jailbroken iPhone for over three years now. How many important iOS updates have there been anyway? All I can recall were the SMS exploit and the PDF exploit for which there was a fix available on Cydia sooner than Apple provided an iOS update.

nessus42• 14 years ago

Personally, I spend so much time in the shell that it's definitely worth spending some effort to increase my ability to use it productively. I switched from tcsh to bash about a year ago after decades of using tcsh. Switching to bash was a mistake; I probably should have switched to zsh instead. Bash is broken as an interactive shell in more ways than I can enumerate; it is a constant source of annoyance and frustration. I have no great love for tcsh, but it is far better as an interactive shell, despite the fact that it truly sucks for programming.

Re what comes with the OS: I haven't logged into a Unix/Linux box in a decade that hasn't had zsh on it.

ta12121• 14 years ago

I've never read about zsh on HN before. I swear it officer.

eblume• 14 years ago

I tried using oh-my-zsh, but all of a sudden bringing up a new terminal (on OS X) went from taking ~1 second to ~5 seconds. Totally killed my interest in zsh.

I'm sure there's a way to make it all work nicely, but bash has been doing just fine for me, I don't feel the need to figure out an entirely new configuration system for a tool that ultimately has little new utility in my workflow.

jff• 14 years ago

I'm thiiiiiis close to going back to rc, because when there's any kind of load on my system it can take multiple seconds for a new xterm to open with bash. rc starts in no time, and I already use it when I have to write a quick one-off script.

oe• 14 years ago

Same thing on a year old MBP. I installed the basic Oh My Zsh package and a new terminal sometimes takes 5-10 seconds to initialize. Are there some tricks that would make it faster? I mainly use the Git-plugin.

osdf• 14 years ago

There is a cleaner 'version' (==fork) of oh-my-zsh that fixed the long startup time for me: https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto. With nice, fast setup (overwrites your .zshrc file!) and lots of documentation.

crazydiamond• 14 years ago

Thanks, I have the same slow startup issue with oh-my-zsh. But the link does not talk about how to migrate from oh-my-zsh to prezto.

Which files should I copy over, or compare and update once I install prezto ?

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

Honestly I do not understand the purpose of oh-my-zsh. I've been using zsh without it for years, if I want something for it I just take 5 minutes on google to figure it out. No sense in having a lot of stuff turned on by default that I don't know how to use.

I feel the same way about Vim, but for some reason more people in the Vim community seem to agree with me.

jrajav• 14 years ago

I had this problem on OS X too, but it had to do with login, not the shell. Try `touch ~/.hushlogin` and see if your shell starts up faster.

Axsuul• 14 years ago

Could it be git?

ithcy24• 14 years ago

Everything in the "Context based tab completion" paragraph is already done by bash_completion.

* It knows which commands git takes? Yes. * which hosts are in my hosts file for ssh? Yes. * which users my system have when I write chmod? Yes. * available packages to apt-get? Yes.

Plus everything in /etc/bash_completion, plus the hundreds of additional commands in /etc/bash_completion.d, plus many, many online resources for creating your own...

bjourne2• 14 years ago

One important difference between how that completion works and zsh's is that zsh cycles between the available completions if you repeatedly type tab. E.g. if you have the files [less01.png, less02.png, less03.png] and type "eog less<tab>" in bash will show you the files. Press tab again and it will list the files again. In zsh, the second tab press would fill in "less01.png", then "less02.png" and so on.

It's a matter of preference which completion strategy is the best, yes. :) But for me I've found that zsh's way to do it saves me many more keystrokes than bash's way.

Evbn• 14 years ago

That is an inputrc configuration not a shell feature.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7179642/how-can-i-make-ba...

Yay Unix. Input collection is a pluggabls component.

buster2• 14 years ago

Been trying zsh for a while, ran fish for 1 or 2 years. Am back to bash because to many scripts rely on bash and wont't work on zsh or fish.

Thing is, it's note that hard to get the mentioned features in bash. Good tab completion, good git enabled color prompt, ssh completion, host completion, command completion and (my favorite) "start typing, press up, cycle through command history with the given input" aka reverse search. I really really liked fish. But incompatibility with bash was just too annoying after a while.

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

I use zsh and write all my ~/bin/ scripts in bash.. what problems did you encounter? I don't see how issues could possibly even occur.

buster2• 14 years ago

You write YOUR scripts in bash, it's not about my scripts though ;)

Also, it's annoying to constantly switch between zsh and bash when you are working on other servers over 50% of your time.

zerop• 14 years ago

Not sure if this is good ask. But windows needs a tool like this. Why not have a port for windows as well.

ithcy24• 14 years ago

like cygwin zsh? Or are you talking about oh-my-zsh?

zobzu• 14 years ago

So I heard "use zsh its so cool" since about 12 years, every 3 month. Here's the new post, just in time.

Don't get me wrong, I use zsh. I also use bash. I end up using more bash than zsh though. The reason are the same as 12 years ago. If zsh was the most popular shell right now the same people would be praising bash.

- they're equally fast for what we need them to do

- they've similar features

- bash is everywhere

- bash is the standard for all scripts

- zsh has extra complexity

Oh yeah and stop using pg-up in bash, use ctrl-r. And if different is cool, I don't know, use fish.

reyan• 14 years ago

I use prezto (https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto -- initially a fork of oh-my-zsh).

dlisboa• 14 years ago

Same here. oh-my-zsh was too slow for me and took away one of the advantages of zsh (that of being faster to load than bash). Also, a great number of oh-my-zsh config options are, to me, incredibly annoying (the long completion menu is the worst shell interface ever invented).

I'm in the process of trimming down prezto to exactly what I need, since it also has too much fluff. It's a great resource, I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a slimmer and easier to grok zsh configuration.

army• 14 years ago

I use zsh for day-to-day use. It's mostly been good to me but sometimes I contemplate switching back to bash because of the performance: sometimes zsh simply hangs for seconds at a time. I'm sure one extension or another is at fault and I could fix the performance issues by reconfiguring things, but I really don't want to put the time into doing that.

dbbolton2• 14 years ago

There's one of these "why you should convert from X to Y" posts every week or so. I understand that a person can be somewhat excited about finding a better application to replace their old stand-by and might feel the need to evangelize. I don't see anything wrong with wanting to introduce others to new software with a helpful attitude.

However, it seems like all of the bash-to-zsh posts boil down to better autocompletion and oh-my-zsh. I haven't really seen anything fresh in quite some time. This is something that I do not understand. Does the author think he is saying something that hasn't been said, or is the hope that if we keep saying the same thing over and over that we can get more people to try zsh? I really can't say.

Also, I recommend not using oh-my-zsh if you are a beginner. Rather, I recommend that you start with a blank slate and read the documentation. This is the only way to get the exact configuration you want. If you don't really care about your shell that much, then why are you switching in the first place? Alternatively, you might try using the "recommended" config offered on first run (I can confirm that the default config on Debian is a good start and will work for most people). Then go through that config while reading the Zsh User Guide[1] and tweak it to your liking. It is my opinion that oh-my-zsh ultimately stops people from reading documentation and offers an incentive (ease of use) for using code that may not be understood (when it probably should be). However, a lot of people seem to like it. Perhaps I am missing something.

My intent is not to discourage this author specifically, but rather to call into question the underlying motivation and behind and utility of all posts of this type.

1 - http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Guide/

daivd3• 14 years ago

The underlying motivation is to write it specifically for a few people, whose current way of working I know, and who have asked me for some information on zsh. If it were not for them, I would not have written it, since I don't add anything new, just summarize in a different way.

Having written it, though, I thought I might share it. For most people, like me, the timing has to be right to try something new. You have to have the time and the motivation and everything else. By sharing it, I hope to hit some people with the right timing (and based on some comments, upvotes, etc, I know I did).

I must have seen 20 Haskell advocacy posts before I actually tried writing something in it. Same with you for some new technologies?

dima553• 14 years ago

The killer feature of zsh is not the tab completion but the globbing. Really.

More or less, you never need the 'find' tool when using zsh. For example, if I want to find all the Makefiles in this or child directories that have the string 'abc' and have been modified less than 1 hour ago, I can do

  $ grep -l abc **/Makefile(mh-1)

If I want to look at the most-recently-modified file, I can

  $ less *(om[1])

If I have a symlink 'dir' that points to a directory and I want to cd to the pointed-to directory, I can

  $ cd dir(:A)

Clearly, there are lots of codes, but you don't need to remember them, since the tab-completion gives you online help. I can type the '(' then press 'tab', and it'll give me a list of the various codes that can follow and what they mean. There are tons of others. If I want all

EXCEPT

*.h

I can use

  '*~*.h'

Or for instance, say I have a directory of photos. I want to pick DSC00095.jpg through DSC00107.jpg. In bash, you cry; in zsh I say

  DSC<95-107>.jpg.

After I've typed in the glob, I can press 'tab', and it'll expand the glob in-place, letting me know if the code worked without executing. I can then undo to get the code back and have it live in my history.

This feature alone is enough to make a switch worthwhile. It did take me an hour to set up my .zshrc to work like bash, but this has easily paid for itself.

lutusp3• 14 years ago

> Or for instance, say I have a directory of photos. I want to pick DSC00095.jpg through DSC00107.jpg. In bash, you cry; in zsh I say DSC<95-107>.jpg.

No need to cry -- Bash does it this way:

   DSC{95..107}.jpg.

0x3e• 14 years ago

zero padding brace expansion has been available since bash version 4 20/02/2009

$ echo {000..10}

000 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010

sneak• 14 years ago

> My intent is not to discourage this author specifically, but rather to call into question the underlying motivation and behind and utility of all posts of this type.

http://xkcd.com/974/

fafner• 14 years ago

> better autocompletion

Bash has context dependent auto completion as well. So what's the advantage of zsh here?

cleverjake• 14 years ago

the quote in your post is the answer to your post.

they both have it - zsh's is better

ghshephard• 14 years ago

I read HN religiously (perhaps too much so), and I am absolutely interested in bash vs zsh - and this is the first time I've read an article on the topic.

Never heard of oh-my-zsh before. Loved the post.

zaptheimpaler• 14 years ago

>I recommend not using oh-my-zsh if you are a beginner I just started started using zsh today, and decided to go with oh-my-zsh instead. zsh is FAR too much configuration to go through to be worth the utility for me. On the other hand, with oh-my-zsh, it took me a few minutes to get a beautiful theme, a bunch of neat plugins (history-substring-search and jump are my favorites right now) and also exposed me to the solarized theme on vim (through a zsh theme that required it).

>It is my opinion that oh-my-zsh ultimately stops people from reading documentation and offers an incentive (ease of use) for using code that may not be understood (when it probably should be)

I'm diametrically opposed to this philosophy. Every time I start out trying to do something perfect or the "right way", I lose interest or time to continue. On the other hand, now that I used oh-my-zsh and it gave me all these awesome features in 10 minutes, I'll be motivated to continue learning about zsh over time.

Not to say that you're wrong and I'm right, just offering a counterpoint.

joshka• 14 years ago

This conflict looks succinctly like bottom up vs top down thinking. Neither is more correct.

tammer• 14 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly, oh-my-zsh is usually recommended to beginners with zsh, but I've always found that to be a mistake.

If you don't understand what zsh can do, how do you expect to take advantage of a highly specialized pre-configuration?

tharris0101• 14 years ago

I used zsh for years. Loved it. I just don't do as much command line stuff anymore so vanilla bash works fine for me. I do miss the history stuff mentioned at the end of the article, though.

djcb• 14 years ago

I've been using zsh for a decade or so, and I like it quite a lot. For basic things, it works enough like bash to hardly notice it; but slowly I've learned all the special tricks.

Now, I would recommend against using /oh-my-zsh/ and the like wholesale; just add useful things to your zsh setup step-by-step, where you actually understand each step.

Otherwise you're just importing a blob of magic that can interact with other things in weird ways. /oh-my-zsh/ contains a lot of gems, but take them one by one.

y4m4• 14 years ago

what a joke!

scrsh• 14 years ago

It's not portable.

And I have to invest time to learn all the codes.

In the times it takes to learn zsh, I could write the same functionality into small sh scripts which I can run on any machine. Put them in a folder, add it to my PATH and I'm in business.

I can tar up this folder and upload it to some internet-connected machine so I can download it to any other machine with an internet connection.

zsh is wonderful. It is the ultimate "interactive" shell. But it's not portable.

Moreover, the less "interactive" I need to be on the command line the better. If I have short, portable scripts to do certain things, and I can run them on any machine with /bin/sh (no need to install anything; sh is the universal interpreter), that's a nice thing to have. zsh won't give me that.

nakkiel2• 14 years ago

I'm not going to elaborate much because I feel I'll waste my and I have a plane to catch but I have yet to see a compelling argument to make me believe zsh is in any way superior to bash.

All posts on the subject show that theirs authors have been using a shell they don't know and have replaced it by another shell plus configuration files made up by someone more clever. All posts are also bullet lists of features bash can actually be configured to do.

Someone wake up.

X6MW3aQrZU5VKkz• 14 years ago

That's exactly how I feel about this as well. I can actually confirm that my bash config does each of these things other than some of the globbing features (* * for instance does work though).

edit: should be two asterix characters with no whitespace in between, but if I do this they're not displayed. Any advice on how to get that working?

lr--rw-rwx• 14 years ago

My concern with Zsh is that is just not that much better than Bash and that's the (valid) reason, why it's not getting widespread adoption.

It's like with Plan9 and Linux or new systems languages which try to make a better C. The technology _is_ better than the existing one, but not that much better that it's that relevant.

I think one of the main problems of current shells is that they try to be a CLI and an interpreter for a programming language (e.g. Bash script) at the same time, but the user uses mostly just one of these features for certain periods of time. At one point he wants to control the computer in a very efficient matter (system usage), so short keystroke sequences are convenient. At other times one wants to do more complex stuff which involves programming (development).

However current Shells are at any point in time prepared for both and that's the reason why both tasks are sometimes cumbersome.

Use Zsh

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