Moving to zsh from bash

July 6, 2012

Alright, after finally stalling it for years, I have finally moved to zsh from the old and trusted bash. I would have to say that I never ever used bash to its maximum power nor I would probably use the maximum features of zsh. But I wanted to see if zsh provides better features for normal to average user like me. Getting the defaults right is big win for me.

Mac OS X comes with a pretty recent version of zsh so you can simply use it or if you like to be on bleeding edge, get it from brew (make sure its then added to /etc/shells). Change your default shell using chsh.

Improvements

Autocompletion - Honestly, the autocompletion is just better. Showing me all the options as menu is awesome.
Autosuggestion and autocorrection - 90% of the time I have achieved right option from zsh. It even autocorrets/suggests aliases.
Finding files - No more complex find commands. All my searches for last week has been ls **/prefix*.
Better movement between folders - I have found that zsh does better completion of directories and when you want to go back one level up.

.oh-my-zsh

From their site:

A handful of functions, auto-complete helpers, and stuff that makes you shout… “OH MY ZSHELL!”

In short, its a collection of community plugins and options that should make your life easier from start but as with all great power comes great responsibility. Its really is double edged sword. On one hand, you get many readymade plugins and solutions that it will cover 99% of your work. On the other, it will be very magic when you cannot figure out why something is working or not working. E.g., I have tmux setup with set-window-option -g automatic-rename off but it was not working because zsh was updating the title. I had to spend some time on Google and finally a fine folk at #tmux pointed me to the right direction.

Conclusion

All in all, I like it and hopefully with more time spent with it, my command line environment is going to get better.

Further reading: One of these days, I am going to sit down and read through the zsh cheatsheet.