| > zsh also performs much better in practice than bash. Not only does it run the same code faster, it subsumes a great deal of functionality that normally requires external utility calls (which are very slow) into the shell itself. For the uninitiated: Zsh parameters expansions and globbing (called "filename generation" in the docs) are beautiful. As I said above, I don't write Bash scripts, I write Zsh scripts, and this kind of thing is why: % cd /tmp
% mkdir example
% cd example
% touch foo
% touch bar
% mkdir "my documents"
% touch "my documents/baz"
% tree -N
.
├── bar
├── foo
└── my documents
└── baz
1 directory, 3 files
% for f in **/*(.);
> do echo File ${f:t} lives in ${f:A:h}
> done
File bar lives in /tmp/example
File foo lives in /tmp/example
File baz lives in /tmp/example/my documents
> Like what? I'm not sure i'd noticed that myself. Sometimes the documentation is vague, maybe hard to find (e.g., the completion system's documentation is a bit overwhelming), but it's always been there when i went looking for it.Fair enough. Although IMO "vague and disorganized" is just as good as "nonexistent". Just try reading the docs for `autoload`/`typeset`/`local`, or `zstyle` [0], or `zmodload`. The whole thing badly needs to be tagged and reverse-indexed by functionality ("how do I accomplish X"), not by flag ("what does foo -q mean?"). I wrote a long comment about this kind of documentation recently [1]. > The plug-in ecosystem (i assume you mean OMZ, zplug, and stuff like that) is entirely unofficial and most of the zsh developers don't seem to care for any of it because it tends to be slow, error-prone, and often just unnecessary. It's also a major support burden for the people on IRC and in the mailing list, which doesn't endear them to it. Might be cool to have something official though. Yes, this. It seems like everyone and their mother at one point decided to try to write a "package manager" for Zsh. But I think the problem with these unofficial plugins is mainly that sourcing thousands of lines of shell script on every terminal load, and running potentially dozens of functions before every command, is just plain slow. Zsh might be faster than Bash, but it's still really really slow. Just looping over 1..1000000 takes well over a second in Zsh, but less than 1/2 second in Python (which is already considered a slow language). What I haven't tried is zcompile-ing all my startup scripts. Would that help? And of course, actually documenting the C API and build process would be a good first step for the maintainers and devs. The example module is easy enough to follow, but actually writing a module is another matter entirely. This is especially frustrating because AFAICT Zsh builtins are themselves implemented as a statically-linked module called "zsh/main", so it must be a powerful system. [0]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/214657 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15479273 |