What’s your favourite to use? Mine is Fish due to its ease of use and user friendly approach.
Bash is the pepperoni of shell tools being reliable in every field no matter what but I’ve moved to Fish as I wanted to try something different.
So what’s your shell of choice?
Swisher sweets but backwoods works too
Powershell, but heavily customized.
Zsh, because unlike Bash using arrays in Zsh doesn’t make me want to perform percussive maintenance on the nearest Von-Neumann machine
I always figured that Ksh / POSIX / Bash shell arrays are kept as they are because anyone with a serious need of arrays ought to be using something better than a scripting language.
Not necessarily.
They’re a basic data structure used everywhere, most notably with command arguments ($@) and can make shell scripts a viable option for many simple tasks if their syntax makes sense and you don’t have to wonder how their expansion works every time you see one being used.An analogy:
My Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver on it. It’s nice to have, and I even used it recently.
It juts out perpendicular to the middle of the knife’s body though, making a literal " |- " shape, so for many applications it’s too awkward for the job.
I also have a more traditional screwdriver. As and when I come to build a new PC, I don’t think I’ll be using the one on the knife.
Eshell because it is consistent cross platform and I switch often for work/etc. Sometimes I’ll use bash when I really want a native shell.
I used fish before eshell and I really like it, the auto complete is nice, but eshell has autocomplete and since aliases and other configurations are in my emacs config, they sync cross platform too.
Bash or ZSH. Whatever is default.
Zsh works for me
Plus oh-my-zsh and the powerline 10k theme - this is my go-to shell.
Pure theme ftw
Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.
Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.
I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.
Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.
Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.
Fish has continued to add bash compat over time.
Definitely fish. It does everything i need out of the box. To achieve the same with zsh, i needed a dozen plugins on top of a plugin manager. Here, in satisfied with just Starship as custom prompt.
That said, i’ve been trying nushell recently. Don’t really think it’s for me, but it is pretty interesting
Zsh + oh-my-zsh
Favorite would be a highly customized zsh.
fizsh (not fish) is what I actually end up using, as I can’t be bothered to copy that config around and retune it for each machine. Gives me the syntactic sugar of zsh with common default options on by default, an OK default prompt, and doesn’t break POSIX assumptions like fish. Also Installs quickly from the package manager without needing to run through the zsh setup each time - unlike oh-my-zsh. And if I still need customization, all the zsh options are still there.
I’ve recently migrated to nushell, I don’t straight up recommend it because it’s not POSIX compliant, so unless you’re already familiar with some other she’ll I would not use it.
That being said, it’s an awesome shell if you deal with structured data constantly, and that’s something I do quite often so for me it’s a great tool.
Just looking at it briefly it looks a lot like PowerShell, any reason to use it over PowerShell?
Never used PowerShell, so I didn’t know that it was available for Linux nor open source, since from a quick search both of them seem to be true I guess there’s no real reason since both are described very similarly.
It’s indeed a lot like powershell, but I found it to be much less painful to use for everyday tasks. I can’t really put my finger on it, but powershell always felt very clunky and unpredictable to use. With Nushell, I can write pipelines that usually have the desired behavior on the first try. Also, its more convenient in so many different aspects that I can’t go back anymore.
The biggest downside is, that it hasn’t had a stable release yet. While I haven’t encountered any bugs yet, there are often breaking changes with new releases that may break your scripts.
Like I said, never used PowerShell, but yeah, nushell pipes are very intuitive, I’ve been only using it for a short time but was already able to do very interesting pipes with minor effort
Yeah, PowerShell does do things that don’t exactly make sense without having some understanding of the underlying dotnet and what the components actually do
PowerShell, with zsh being a close second
Feeling risky today, eh? Mind sharing the reasoning behind your extravagant choice?
Not sure what’s extravagant about it… Fully object oriented pipeline in a scripting language built on and with access to the .NET type class system is insanely powerful. Having to manipulate and parse string output to extract data from command results in other shells just feels very cumbersome and antiquated, and relies on the text output to remain consistent to not break
PowerShell, it doesn’t matter if more or less data is returned, as long as the properties you’re using stay the same your script will not break
Filtering is super easy
The Verb-Noun cmdlet naming convention gets a lot of (undeserved) hate, but it makes command discovery way easier. Especially when you learn that there’s a list of approved verbs with defined meanings, and cmdlets with matching nouns tend to work together.
It actually follows the Unix philosophy of each cmdlet doing one thing (though sometimes a cmdlet winds up getting overloaded, but more often than not that’s a community or privately written cmdlet)
It’s easily powerful enough to write programs with (and I have)
And it works well with C#, and if you know some C#, PowerShell’s eccentricities start to make way more sense
Also, I mainly manage Windows servers for work running in an AD domain, so it’s absolutely the language of choice for that, but I’ve been using it for probably close to 14 years now and I can basically write it as easily as English at this point
Bash, zshell, BusyBox…you don’t really need anything else
zsh because I’ve been using it since college and I don’t like change
zsh, because of highly customizable.
