| I agree that using zsh has to be justified. My suggestions for bash users who want to get more out of their (interactive) shell are: 1. Learn bash better. Lots of low-hanging fruit there to increase your productivity with minimal effort. 2. Learn how to customize your environment in bash. Know what every line in your dotfiles does. Add to your dotfiles gradually as you learn. 3. If you learn about some cool features in zsh, see if bash has the feature already. If it doesn't, see if you can mimic it easily with your own functions or scripts. 4. If you still want more features, make the switch to zsh and repeat steps 1 and 2 with zsh. I think the worst is when people see a novel trick and switch to zsh and slam in oh-my-zsh* without knowing any shell basics. Now you have another shell and a big pile of code and you don't understand any of it. This usually won't cause problems, but you almost certainly won't be getting the most out of your shell. You'd be better off in most cases just digging into bash a little deeper. I use zsh now, but I only switched after learning what bash could do and what its limitations are. I'll reevaluate zsh vs. bash 4.0 at some point, but for now I see zsh installed by default more often than bash 4.0 and it seems to me that most users interested in the best interactive shell experience are still on zsh and I like to learn from them. * - I think oh-my-zsh is a great project - I'm not knocking it. I've borrowed lots of great stuff from it. But I think you should understand every line of code you are dumping into your environment, whether you are using oh-my-zsh or not. |