What’s your favourite to use? Mine is Fish due to its ease of use and user friendly approach.
Bash is the pepperoni of shell tools being reliable in every field no matter what but I’ve moved to Fish as I wanted to try something different.
So what’s your shell of choice?
Zsh works for me
Plus oh-my-zsh and the powerline 10k theme - this is my go-to shell.
Definitely fish. It does everything i need out of the box. To achieve the same with zsh, i needed a dozen plugins on top of a plugin manager. Here, in satisfied with just Starship as custom prompt.
That said, i’ve been trying nushell recently. Don’t really think it’s for me, but it is pretty interesting
bash is so ubiquitous that I never considered anything else.
Don’t try zsh, because you won’t be able to go back to bash after that 😉
Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.
Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.
I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.
Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.
Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.
Fish has continued to add bash compat over time.
while I still use ohmyzsh, a lot of it’s opponents make it’s slowness one of its complaints. You don’t need ohmyzsh to have fancy things, it’s just makes setting it all up a little easier.
Bash is fine. Zsh on Macs is fine too. I can’t stress how useful it is to learn busybox if you end up with a shell on an embedded device.
All these crazy shells people talk about are kinda like race car controls. I’m not driving a race car, I’m driving a box truck with three on the tree.
zsh
I’ve explained my choice for zsh here
Nicely configured it’s so convenient that I spend most of my time in the terminal and don’t even use a file explorer anymore. It can also be expanded with some plugins for specific use-cases.
Your website’s theme is very pleasant to look at and also serves good for a blog since everything is easy to read. Good job, if you were the one who made it
Thank you very much for your feedback. I’ve spent quite some time trying to create a minimalist and efficient theme. Very glad to hear that I met this goal.
You and me both.
I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.
I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.
Even on Windows I try to avoid Powershell. I use bash through GitBash there, too. But, I don’t mind using Powershell for work, because some workflows are already implemented in ps1-scripts.
zsh, because of highly customizable.
The PEPPPERONI of tools!? that’s not a thing right? why pepperoni??
Because pepperoni rocks
Soft shell tacos are my favorite. Hard shell is ok but there’s nothing like a double wrapped soft taco.
Oh and I just use bash.
Pff, newbie. I bash my tacos!
/s
I really like fish because it has excellent contextual autocomplete based on the folder you’re in. I haven’t used any other shell that was as good at it.
nushell is excellent for dealing with structured data. it’s also great as a scripting language.
Zsh
No plugin manager. Zsh has a builtin plugin system (
autoload) and ships with most things you want (like Git integration).My config: http://github.com/cbarrick/dotfiles
I really like nushell, which has more of a feel and ergonomics of a modern programming language without the idiosyncrasies of traditional shells (so it’s obviously not POSIX shell compatible).
One major downside is that it’s not yet stable, so breaking changes between releases are expected.
