[doubled112]

You learn all of that, find yourself logged into somebody else’s server, and you only have bash again.

Sorry, trying to be funny, not dismissive.

I think shells in general could use some rethinking, considering they still feel pretty 80s.

Familiarity (or my lack of) is likely a big reason I’ll miss the obvious.

Zsh fills in many of the same checkboxes while being similar enough you don’t lose muscle memory when you find a bash shell somewhere.

Maybe someday something else will take over. Windows has the advantage there, for sure.

[partdavid]

Oh, it's not dismissive at all. It's not just a real consideration, it's an overriding one. I switched my "daily driver" shell to powershell but I still write CI/CD scripts in bash, and docker entrypoints, and cloud-init userdata, and utilities, because it's niche enough to be too much to ask my coworkers and community folks to also switch.

I do wonder about the muscle memory thing. I think having to create scripts in bash keeps my hand in enough that I won't lose it too badly. At least I hope so. I compared switching shells to switching keyboard layouts; something I also did, and something where it's been some effort to retain enough muscle memory to not completely flail when presented with another computer.

[imtringued]

Bash is bloated. I have seen bash executables in the megabytes range. Preinstalled bash is not an argument in favour of using it.

[doubled112]

Extracted, this Linux build of Powershell (v7.4.5) 174MB.

[partdavid]

Yeah, it's hard to do a direct comparison, because bash needs a bunch of other utilities to be useful and they also take up space. In theory you can pick and choose but woe be to you if you want to use bash without sed, awk, cut, etc.

But it's true that, like, you get help with Powershell but that might not matter on a system where you wouldn't choose to install man pages or something.