Zsh as default in Mac OS 15 / zsh "primer"?

Zsh as default in Mac OS 15 / zsh "primer"?

[TJ Luoma]

I've been told that zsh is the default shell in the new version of
macOS "Catalina".

Someone just asked me if I had a quick primer on why zsh is "better"
than other shells.

I've never really used others so I don't really know much about it, so
I wasn't sure what to suggest other than Googling,

Tj

--
TJ Luoma
TJ @ MacStories
Personal Website: luo.ma (aka RhymesWithDiploma.com)
Twitter: @tjluoma

Re: Zsh as default in Mac OS 15 / zsh "primer"?

[dana]

On 3 Jun 2019, at 16:07, TJ Luoma <luomat@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been told that zsh is the default shell in the new version of
> macOS "Catalina".

For reference: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208050

On 3 Jun 2019, at 16:07, TJ Luoma <luomat@gmail.com> wrote:
> Someone just asked me if I had a quick primer on why zsh is "better"
> than other shells.

Pretty broad and subjective topic, but off the top of my head i would suggest
the following major benefits:

* More advanced line-editing and tab-completion; completion scripts are
  updated regularly and shipped with the shell itself

* Saner and more powerful parameter expansion (white-space handling, nesting,
  splitting, filtering, quoting, &c.)

* More functionality built directly into the shell, which can make many
  scripting tasks faster to perform (likely at the expense of some start-up
  and memory over-head), as well as more portable across different systems (as
  long as you have zsh, obviously)

The FAQ covers much of this: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/FAQ/

There are also a guide (http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Guide/zshguide.html) and a
book, but none of them were really designed to 'pitch' zsh to users of other
shells AFAIK

dana

Re: Zsh as default in Mac OS 15 / zsh "primer"?

[Sebastian Gniazdowski]

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Zsh language and its environment are more advanced and this allowed me to
create an advanced plugin manager for it, zplugin (
https://github.com/zdharma/zplugin). When I was thinking about creating
similar plugin manager for Bash, it seemed problematic and some features
(like turbo mode) would have to be absent. In effect, Zsh gains one more
advantage: plugin manager and the plugins microcosm.

pon., 3 cze 2019, 23:11 użytkownik TJ Luoma <luomat@gmail.com> napisał:

> I've been told that zsh is the default shell in the new version of
> macOS "Catalina".
>
> Someone just asked me if I had a quick primer on why zsh is "better"
> than other shells.
>
> I've never really used others so I don't really know much about it, so
> I wasn't sure what to suggest other than Googling,
>
> Tj
>
> --
> TJ Luoma
> TJ @ MacStories
> Personal Website: luo.ma (aka RhymesWithDiploma.com)
> Twitter: @tjluoma
>

Re: Zsh as default in Mac OS 15 / zsh "primer"?

[Peter Stephenson]

On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 17:07 -0400, TJ Luoma wrote:
> I've been told that zsh is the default shell in the new version of
> macOS "Catalina".
> 
> Someone just asked me if I had a quick primer on why zsh is "better"
> than other shells.
> 
> I've never really used others so I don't really know much about it, so
> I wasn't sure what to suggest other than Googling,

The classic introduction to this is the intro.ms file in the Doc directory of
the source.  That goes right back to the earlier days, so doesn't mention
programmable completion, but is a pretty good introduction to why zsh
was different in the first place.

The format it's in shows it's age.  You might be best simply to do something
like

nroff -ms intro.ms| colcrt | uniq >intro.txt

pws

Re: Zsh as default in Mac OS 15 / zsh "primer"?

[TJ Luoma]

It seems like a resource that we could use, but don't really have. I
wish I knew enough to write one myself. As I said to my friend who
told me about the change in Mac OS, I got started with zsh back around
1991 but never really used any other shell, so I don't really know
what it does better than others or that others don't do, because it's
what I've always used.

I'll see if a web search turns up anything useful. If I find something
worth sharing, I'll report back to the list.

TjL


--
TJ Luoma
TJ @ MacStories
Personal Website: luo.ma (aka RhymesWithDiploma.com)
Twitter: @tjluoma

Re: Zsh as default in Mac OS 15 / zsh "primer"?

[Aaron Schrab]

At 17:07 -0400 03 Jun 2019, TJ Luoma <luomat@gmail.com> wrote:
>I've been told that zsh is the default shell in the new version of
>macOS "Catalina".

Interesting that Apple's going back to that. zsh was also the default 
shell in the public beta of OS X that they made available before the 
initial release back in 2001.