I 💘 BASH, I used it every day since 1999 👨🎓👨💻. But ZSH looks so nice and after giving it a proper shot, using it for a day in January 2019, I fell in love with it.
Tab completion with documentation
Kill with tab completion
Auto suggestions
Emacs/BASH like navigation
Pressing M-f and M-b navigates differently than in BASH or in
Emacs, e.g. pressing M-f when the cursor (|) is on curl:
|curl -u admin:admin http://foo-world.com
it jumps to after -u instead of after `curl:
curl -u| admin:admin http://foo-world.com
To remedy this, I've set this in my .zshrc:
autoload -U select-word-style
select-word-style bash
Now, I get Emacs/BASH like navigation, hitting M-f here:
|curl -u admin:admin http://foo-world.com
takes me to:
curl| -u admin:admin http://foo-world.com
just like I wanted too 😄
Forgetting a pipe
$ bash
$ echo hi |
> wc
$ zsh
$ echo i |
pipe> wc
Forgetting a quote
$ bash
$ echo 'hi
> '
$ zsh
$ echo 'hi
quote> '
Shows you if command will be found
Powerful recursive file name matching
BASH has this too, albeit not enabled by default
$ ls ~/.m2/repository/org/**/*.pom | tail -n 3
ls: cannot access '/home/torstein/.m2/repository/org/**/*.pom': No such file or directory
$ shopt -s globstar
$ ls ~/.m2/repository/org/**/*.pom | tail -n 3
/home/torstein/.m2/repository/org/yaml/snakeyaml/1.15/snakeyaml-1.15.pom
/home/torstein/.m2/repository/org/yaml/snakeyaml/1.17/snakeyaml-1.17.pom
/home/torstein/.m2/repository/org/yaml/snakeyaml/1.18/snakeyaml-1.18.pom
$
Closing a shell where you've started an app
Unlike BASH, you must disown the process(es) you've started in the
shell, before closing it:
$ firefox &
$ disown %firefox
$ exit
Fortunately, zsh gives you auto completion on the jobs to diswown,
still it's more cumbersome than bash and dash.
Pure prompt
Async
Fancy prompts with things like git status in them are more snappy than
in bash. I suspect this is because ZSH executes those fancy prompt
functions on a separate thread and then decorates your prompt when it
has gotten the data it needs.
Can re-use BASH aliases
In both my .bashrc. and .zshrc, I've got this line:
source $HOME/.bashrc.aliases
Setting up ZSH on Debian
# apt install fzf
# apt install zsh
# apt install zsh-autosuggestions
# apt install zsh-syntax-highlighting
