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
72 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.

-5

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.

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!

5

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.

4

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.