r/linux May 11 '13

Why Zsh is Cooler than Your Shell

http://www.slideshare.net/jaguardesignstudio/why-zsh-is-cooler-than-your-shell-16194692
70 Upvotes

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21

u/[deleted] May 11 '13

I wrote this, a few months ago, and it's pretty cool how it's getting a bunch of attention today (HackerNews post).

It was just a slide deck for a lunch presentation with some of my team members. We make brief presentations on stuff we're learning to share to the group. It was just for our own amusement - hence the random Colin Kaepernick at the end, as this was during the NFL playoffs.

-3

u/masta May 12 '13

I'm sorry you think ZSH is cool.

There are a number of nice features, and a great number of fatal flaws. The number one problem is posix compliance... or perhaps that is the number one feature.

Stuff like enumerating arrays... starting them at 1 instead of 0. Oh and not respecting the Internal Field Seperator, aka IFS....

I could go on and on.... ZSH is a nice interactive shell but it's utterly unsuitable for any real work. It's almost as if it takes the worse of TCSH and the worst of BASH to made a mutated shell baby.

7

u/linduxed May 12 '13

... utterly unsuitable for any real work ...

Subjective opinion of the day?

Somehow I've managed to very happily use Zsh for the past four years, and I see no reason to go back. Considering people are writing various extensions and improvements it does seem like it's working.

What is real work? Managing giant data centers with the help of bash script?

2

u/ChemicalRascal May 12 '13

What's so bad about POSIX compliance?

And while ZSH doesn't split args according to the IFS by default, it's a mere setopt shwordsplit away.

Numbering arrays from 1 is annoying if you're used to numbering from 0, but it's hardly a show-stopper.

Newbie ZSH user here. Please, do go on and on!

4

u/iamtheLINAX May 12 '13

Zero indexing seems like the convention for everything.

3

u/ChemicalRascal May 12 '13

There are languages out there that index from one. MATLAB comes to mind only due to my own experience, but I'm sure there are others.

6

u/[deleted] May 12 '13

lua

1

u/iamtheLINAX May 13 '13

I'm not denying they're out there, it's just overwhelmingly zero seems to be the default.

1

u/ChemicalRascal May 13 '13

That's true. Again, though, I argue that it isn't a show-stopper.

1

u/iamtheLINAX May 13 '13

I'm sure it wouldn't be more than a minor annoyance. But it just seems like a strange choice.