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Since when is mainstream better? Why did they choose zsh? They don't justify that either. It's just odd to pick one post-bash shell but not the other when they
by SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Since when is mainstream better? Why did they choose zsh? They don't justify that either. It's just odd to pick one post-bash shell but not the other when they have very similar feature sets—autocomplete, persistent global variables, attention to end-user quality.
EDIT: apparently zsh doesn't have persistent or global variables, my bad.
- GavinMcG 7y agoMainstream is often better in terms of unofficial support/learning resources, and by definition better in terms of familiarity/market share. For something like a shell, forcing a niche choice needs justification when it's not clearly better than the alternatives.
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoFish is clearly better than the alternatives.
- nikeee 7y agoWell, fish is not compatible to bash. Users would suddenly face bash-one-liners that they find on StackOverflow to stop working.
- latexr 7y agoMost Terminal users might not even notice the shell changed from Bash to ZSH. Those same users would notice it, had they changed it to Fish.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago> Most Terminal users might not even notice the shell changed from Bash to ZSH. If that's an argument in favor of ZSH, I think I've missed the point.
- latexr 7y agoIt’s an argument in favour of ZSH over Fish. It will cause less disruption, while providing better features than the current default.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago> while providing better features than the current default. Barely—it doesn't address any fundamental issues with bash, it's basically a coat of paint. It does make sense that tech companies are only into disruption if they can profit from it.
- Sean1708 7y agoThe point is that apple don't want to update bash because they don't want to ship software that uses GPLv3 but they also don't want to keep shipping a decade old version of bash as the default shell, they aren't doing this because they want to improve on bash or anything like that.
- spartanatreyu 7y agoThere's already a lot of community support available for zsh. Plenty of developers are using oh-my-zsh either for just the plugin support or for the very popular iterm+powerlevel9k+agnoster theming.