Zsh vs bash reddit github Jan 11, 2025 路 The Zsh vs Bash debate boils down to their unique features, strengths, and intended use cases. Thanks for the correction. I highly recommended it for your interactive shell and to reserve bash for cross-platform scripting. A delightful community-driven framework for managing your bash configuration, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community. Bash and PowerShell are both shells, but of the two, PowerShell is vastly, vastly, vastly more powerful as a tool. 235K subscribers in the linuxquestions community. Zsh doesn't treat # as a comment start on the command line by default, only in scripts (including . bash_profile config for various command line tools; less common but not unheard of to get a . He updates it fairly regularly if you check the commits, haven’t looked at the open issues as I haven’t had any and use it on many different With zsh you can have syntax highlighting and indicating various things in the prompt, like git repo branch, status, or whether or not you're in vim normal mode (editing the command in vim mode is possible in both bash and zsh in case you didn't know) I'm searching for a shell prompt, preferably cross-shell, but both bash and zsh are fine. I believe both have the necessary plugins and themes I need, so it all just comes down to speed. I love zsh too, but any git plugin i can find for it takes a long time to load at the start up or on enter a git folder, so i use fish as i don't get that. Here are all popular alternatives of powerlevel10k with their pros and cons. Starship is great. Git Bash is just bash with git commands made easily available. Zsh is designed to be a highly customizable shell with an interactive command-line interface for executing commands, running shell scripts, and performing various system administration tasks. As long as your zsh prompt reaches to the right edge of the terminal, resizing the terminal will cause visual artifacts. Agnoster polls git status synchronously Using git bash for some time but now have added cygwin with it's bash terminal. Edit: Sep 1, 2024 路 Here are just some of the extensions possible: [showcase some Zsh plugins and themes] Fish limits addons to "completions" – but prioritizes a simplified experience with smart defaults aimed not to need heavy tweaking. I switched to zsh less than a year ago now, and have fallen in love with the great customization that oh my zsh provides. 74 votes, 130 comments. Bash remains highly capable and is the most widely used and supported shell across Unix-like systems, with a vast ecosystem of scripts and tools built around it. A language server for Bash. COM. - Themes · ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh Wiki Bash is where most people come from and what they are familiar with. Its code is easy to understand even if you don't have much experience with zsh. I like zsh personally, but bash and fish are perfectly useable. On windows I can use the powershell module "posh git" to show info about my git repo when I'm in a directory with a . git directory. are available in Bash interactive sessions! I never post anything but I have become so impressed by its auto-completion in Bash that I thought I must share this. You can do everything you want with zsh easily without it. Nov 11, 2021 路 I’ve recently started using Windows again. They environments are different, have different paths as well as config file names. Apr 3, 2011 路 The configuration framework for Zsh. When working from the command line, you might have stumbled across unpleasant situations where the CWD displayed by the shell prompt gets too long, leading to annoying line wraps. Zim Framework: The Zsh configuration framework with blazing speed and modular extensions. It includes 300+ plugins, themes, and tweaks to supercharge your terminal experience. I don't have enough experience with the git module to tell you if it can do 100% of what you want exactly, but things like the starting prompt character, colors, and the paths should be doable pretty easily. Fish is much easier to setup, but the incompatibilities with bash discourage me from learning. I use the "my dotfiles collection github repository" method. Scripting Capabilities Developers spend much of shell time writing scripts to automate tasks or run builds. DT mentioned that he uses all three, I'm wondering how a workflow using three shells would be like and what each shell would be used for? Moving from Zsh to Fish 馃悹 I recently began experimenting with Fish after a long time using zsh and oh my zsh. Bash vs. Apr 25, 2025 路 Starting with macOS Catalina, Apple ditched Bash as the default shell and gave Zsh the crown. The rc in zshrc stands for "Run Commands Also, it's common to provide a . Oct 11, 2022 路 Well, WSL it's a good way to have a Unixish environment on Windows, but sadly his performance and Tagged with productivity, zsh, git, terminal. Bash scripts are very common so depending on the conversation shell script might be synonymous with bash script. - alebcay/awesome-shell Nov 26, 2024 路 While Zsh is not completely compatible with Bash, it shares some similar functionalities and features with Bash. Reply reply captainstormy • These days, you can run Powershell and Git Bash on Windows 10. I'm increasingly seeing Zsh being recommended, but I'm having trouble finding a useful eplanation about its advantages vs bash. Fish vs. After removing it everything seemed to be fixed. The changes they made do make for a cleaner language, but it's a new language nonetheless. Fish and zsh are probably the most customizable, but bash is still fine. Since then, many developers have wondered: What’s the difference between Bash and Zsh? and Should I switch? check out how to install an awesome Linux-like terminal natively on windows! for farther details check the instructions here Eliav2/windows-zsh: how… About Bash Line Editor鈥昦 full-featured line editor written in pure Bash! Syntax highlighting, auto suggestions, vim modes, etc. This is even more likely when using a terminal multiplexer like tmux, which I mostly use powershell, git bash and wsl. So it gives you both a terminal and bash, but in windows. The features and configurations are simple and extensive, and I especially like that it works in PowerShell just as well as in zsh, I can have the same prompt configuration across Windows and Linux. Moving to zsh from bash was pretty simple. A curated list of awesome command-line frameworks, toolkits, guides and gizmos. g. Is there a way to auto git pull my dotfiles if there are changes between remote and local? I considered just adding a small git pull on startup script, but I feel like the startup time penalty would be too much. zsh offers a superset of capability. You should become familiar with Bash, and read through a cheat sheet or two so that you have a general awareness of its capabilities. I’m using bash since that’s what the team does but I’d still like to understand. zshrc. zshrc and such). Like saying "car" is generic where "Toyota Corolla" is the specific car. Edit: Don't know if that was good analogy, but should get the point. With zsh, I am working (with nearly) a superset of bash. I operate all these different shells in the windows terminal. It looks like there is a module for git for zsh that does this but I don't see an option like this for bash. I also share some of the many mistakes I made in trying to configure fish to behave a bit like a We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. I've found Starship, a cross-shell prompt and Spaceship, a zsh prompt. Inspired by awesome-php. It's really quite awesome indeed. However, in Unix, there was always a lot of shells. - ohmybash/oh-my-bash Zephyr (and similar projects like zsh-utils) aim to help people shed the bloated and slow big name Zsh frameworks, and give you just the core essentials and then let you use a plugin-only approach to building your ideal Zsh environment. Sep 14, 2024 路 Select a Supported Shell: Press CMD/CTRL + Shift + P again, search for "Terminal: Select Default Profile," and choose a supported shell (zsh, bash, fish, or PowerShell). However PowerShell is about working with objects while shells like Bash are about working with streams of Of the bourne-like shells, zsh has the most comprehensive and featureful implementation of autocompletion. Just recently a colleague told me he's using starship. I didn't like oh-my-zsh at all and made the zsh configuration by myself. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Fish provides all of those features natively, is much easier to configure (ever tried writing a completion script for zsh vs fish?), and is significantly faster. The colors of Git Bash come from the MINGW64 which stands for Minimum GNU for Windows 64 bit which I don't think it's available on Linux. Thus far it’s been a good experience so thought I’d share why I did it, how I tweaked my setup and my thoughts on Fish so far. Here are a few: The main features involve things like tab completion, which zsh can do by picking items from a menu (bash displays the options, but doesn't let you pick one, you just keep typing and try again). None of those are going to be faster or have more features. bash became popular because of Linux, but if you had other shells installed, you could use them. Is it really a problem to use For a noob - can someone please explain the pros/cons/differences in using Git GUI, Git bash and just using the command line? Title. Tried Alcritty/Kitty/st/rxvt etc and if you dont want to spend an year configuring your terminal, just dont bother. A subreddit for asking question about Linux and all things pertaining to it. Contribute to romkatv/zsh4humans development by creating an account on GitHub. You‘ll learn about their origins, syntax variations, scripting and interactive capabilities, use cases, communities, and more through insightful examples and analysis. After a long time using a customised Zsh shell on macOS and Linux though, I’ve started to miss some of the small productivity boosts that Zsh plugins offered me. writing a script in WSL environment but expect it to run on the Windows based filesystem, or you're interacting/making windows executables and you already have a git bash window open We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. zsh{env,rc} loading files. Also tab completion for the beginnings of commands and filenames, rather than only the end. You could write an Ansible playbook to define these steps more rigorously. I got some negative comments about it by other software engineers in the team since they prefer the GitHub GUI or other GUI-based tools. From a user perspective, interactive zsh is bash++. This approach is not relying on WSL, it is utilizing existing Git installation on Windows. I am a Bash user looking into switching to Fish (or Zsh). The most customizable and low-latency cross platform/shell prompt renderer. And stock zsh required me to port all my bash setup, in addition to it providing only very few worthwhile niceties out-of-the-box. Dec 9, 2023 路 BASH (Bourne Again Shell) is the default shell that you will find in Linux systems. They are very similar. 2+ but we are geared also toward power users, and one or two of the more complex plugins may need bash 5 features to run. Other than that, there are not many different from bash as interactive shell. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community. I installed ZSH autosuggestions and syntax highlight in the beginning. Confirmed working on zsh and PowerShell likely will handle most Bourne-style shells (ksh, csh,) hells - SkyN9ne/OhMyPosh I use fish so I don't have to install oh-my-zsh, oh-my-bash to have something that works at least OK out of the box. It's easy to write pipelines, loops, command subs, etc because I'm used to bash already from script-writing. 99% distro is bash, but there are alternatives such as zsh, which is much more feature-full or dash, which gives up features for absolute speed, or fish, which came with a lot of nice to haves by default. I've similar setup and this is my plugins git dirhistory zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting and zoxide with `p10k` theme. (Maybe Zsh or Fish, also. I picked up Starship over Christmas last year, and it is definitely a game changer in making it so much easier to build a modular and reusable prompt that gives me the information in need with a simple configuration. I am using windows (have no other option at the moment) and I'm pushing regularely my code to a remote repository on github. 55 votes, 106 comments. Plus, you'll learn if being POSIX-compliant actually matters Zsh / Oh-my-zsh on Windows Git Bash. Zsh is built on top of BASH so it has some extra features. But even for bash scripts it's good form to always use a shebang. The Zsh module “zstyle” allows you to configure settings for a specific Zsh module or widget. I'm using the number of stars on github as a proxy for popularity. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. Discover which is better for scripting, performance, customization, and productivity in your terminal workflow. Conceptually it's a combination of both a "terminal" and a "shell" rolled into one git bash: I think it's what the git-for-windows team added in because so many things in git depend on Linux/Unix concepts/tools that it was easier to create "git bash" than to port the code that uses bash [1]. This is where Sorin objected and said that git is already a perfect versioning We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Out of ten, how difficult would it be to support the same zsh themes in nu? Edit: oops, I was using bash not sh. To remedy this, I looked into how I could set I still use git bash often, simply because the window opens faster. Whenever I copy and paste a line to terminal My preferred user shell is zsh. As far as For those that are Bash committed like myself, FISH or ZSH aren’t options. Windows Powershell, Windows Command Shell, Bash, zsh are all examples of shells. These terms are often used interchangeably but are technically distinct. bash, fish will run it with bash. com Apr 11, 2025 路 Learn the key differences between Zsh and Bash—two powerful Unix shells. May 21, 2025 路 Bash strictly adheres to POSIX standards, which ensures broad compatibility across Unix-like systems. Zsh, while mostly compatible with Bash, prioritizes features and user experience over strict POSIX compliance. Bash vs Zsh vs Fish? Hello. Syntax highlighting made my terminal act very weirdly as whenever I typed something or removed a character the whole terminal flashed. Using zstyle is the most flexible way to tune the completion system. For instance, robbyrussel has in one of the discussions in the issues-section of his repo explicitly said that the project is for people just coming over to ZSH, which is most likely why he, for example, included the auto-updater. It comes with Git, Bash, and (I think) it's own terminal. Contribute to sorin-ionescu/prezto development by creating an account on GitHub. This article dives into the differences between Bash and Zsh, comparing their features, scripting capabilities, performance, and customization options to help users choose the right shell for their needs in 2025. My environment is set up to support either based on group of startup scripts I maintain. While they share many similarities, they also have distinct features. However, there are other alternatives for the Linux shell such as 'zsh' and 'xonsh'. I wanted to implement this similar to how the oh-my-zsh auto updater works, but I am drawing a blank. ) Pretty, minimal and fast ZSH prompt. May 29, 2019 路 The Git installer will create a shortcut to launch this "private" version of bash, hence "git bash". Shell script is a generic term for bash, csh, fish, zsh, sh, etc scripts. Is there anything out there to get this functionality Aug 21, 2024 路 Note: While these shells offer various advantages, the choice of shell often depends on specific use cases, personal preferences, and the operating system environment. I work with a lot of different systems and am constantly tweaking my dotfiles. For the first 13 years of using Linux, I only used bash. And since most of my work is in the wsl i use that a lot too. Contribute to eza-community/eza development by creating an account on GitHub. While Bash is a robust, reliable shell widely used for scripting and basic command-line tasks, Zsh takes things further with modern enhancements, customizability, and interactivity. Give it a try guys. In following aspects, cicada wants to do a better (sanity) job: Completion History Customize Prompt Compare to shells like zsh/fish, cicada tends to be a simpler shell. I was quickly turned off by the long Verb-Name syntax since its really verbose. Is there a limit of what git bash cannot do as a shell, which command prompt can? Or a git bash can replace command prompt? Bash-it is a collection of community Bash commands and scripts for Bash. Somewhat recently, Mac started using zsh (you can change the shell as bash should still be installed). To enable interactive comments, run setopt interactive_comments. This difference matters when you‘re writing scripts that need to run on multiple systems: # This works in both Bash and Zsh Learn "shell", prefer bash Make sure you install a modern version of bash Make sure when you put a #! xxx shebang at the start of a script it references the shell you are actually targeting (so sh for posix, bash for bash, zsh for zsh) Don't configure your system to use bash as a default shell, learn to live with and understand differences. 馃檭 A delightful community-driven (with 2,400+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Contribute to sindresorhus/pure development by creating an account on GitHub. It gets a bit complicated if you're e. If you need that, stay posix-compatible (but honestly, if you find yourself copying big scripts into interactive sessions a lot r/zshHi all, I just released hburger, a way to compress the current working directory in your shell prompt while preserving readability. The Windows command prompt runs the default Windows shell, CMD. Scroll up to see the mess. Sometimes i need something that has a deeper grip in the system or some automated scripts to run in Autostart then i use powershell. If this bothers you, there are several mitigation options. I’m new to using git and I’m trying to understand using one vs the other. You actually don't need a bash shebang; if you name your script script. What are your reasons for using zsh or sticking with bash? Add a Comment Sort by: Best Open comment sort options Top New Controversial Old Q&A [deleted] • I use zsh because of Vim mode and its amazing autocompletion and fish-like syntax highlighting and suggestion. wsl is a separate file system, though it can interact with the Windows one, but I tend to forget that. 馃啔 Bash vs Zsh: Comparison Cheat Sheet 馃攳 Overview Both Bash and Zsh are powerful Unix shells that provide a command-line interface to interact with the operating system. Which one is faster? starship is written in rust so maybe it has Running, for example, git status, runs the same thing on bash, fish, zsh, sh, and every other shell as long as it is not aliased to something else and git is in the shell path. Cue the collective sighs and confusion. If you want to use zsh, AVOID installing oh-my-zsh. Hello, I've heard about zsh a few times, and just looking into it, it looks significantly nicer than bash with a lot of great… Is Bash more powerful than Powershell ? or just less modern ? When Powershell will be able to manage a full production linux environment ? Starting with macOS Catalina, Apple changed the default shell from Bash to Zsh. I am using arch linux and using bash as my shell. EXE, which is a derivative of the old MS-DOS command shell, COMMAND. Main differences for scripting (and for power users on the command line of course). Does it make sense to install on top of that an oh my posh? I have been using oh my posh in windows and a really like easiness of modifying a theme and better git status color control (pushed, not pushed etc). zshrc config, plus zsh offers a bash-compatibility mode that can read . I also suggest using fish shell vs zsh for same reasons, and look into tmux or zellij if you use terminal or ssh a lot. Cicada is trying to support most common cases that Bash supports, except the Bash scripting language. I don't feel any slowness, the terminal opens instantly, What slowness do you face, I just want to know, as I've read the same, but my experience is not like that. ZSH is an extension to BASH that is now the default shell in macOS systems. Are there any benefits to using PowerShell over Bash or Zsh in a Unixy OS? I've been looking at different shells and briefly tried the tutorial for PowerShell. In terms of automation, for ohmyzsh, you just need to git clone the ohmyzsh supporting zsh plugin into the ohmyzsh plugin directory, and add whatever additional configuration into the . Scripts always use the "#!/bin/bash" or "#!/bin/zsh" to direct the target environment. A coworker of mine uses fish instead and he's frequently grumbling over lack of fish support for this or that tool. Zsh Getting Started with Fish Basic Commands Setting Variables Exporting Variables Configuration Using fish_config for Configuration Functions Aliases and Abbreviations Aliases (Using Functions in Fish) Abbreviations Command Substitutions Loops and Conditionals For Loop While Loop If Statement Interactive Features Jun 8, 2024 路 This article contains unstructions on how to configure Windows Terminal to use Oh My Posh with Zsh and zsh-autosuggestions. sh or script. But here’s the deal—if you’re doing any real terminal work on macOS, it’s worth knowing why that switch happened and whether you should care. For copy-pasting scripts from the internet: well, there's no easy solution to that. At first I thought it's just another terminal, but turns out it's a customisation prompt like omz. Well there's a difference between sorin and robbyrussel when it comes to this. This is true for all themes. Measure your shell startup time between fish and zsh (with comparable features) and you’ll see what I mean. See full list on howtogeek. The most popular and the default of 99. (And a shameless ripoff of oh-my-zsh 馃槂) 97% of the code is compatible with bash 3. Zsh is great, and is even better with oh-my-zsh, but if you have to deal with Linux that may or not have zsh (including legacy ones), and colleagues that may or not know/use zsh, probably sticking with bash is a good choice. Contribute to bash-lsp/bash-language-server development by creating an account on GitHub. How do Fish and Zsh syntaxes compare to Bash here? Zsh remains close Dec 27, 2023 路 In this comprehensive 2500+ word guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about Zsh vs Bash scripting. Basic Features of Bash and Zsh None of them matter for gaming, it's merely preference and use case for your choices. Agnoster is a classic time-tested theme with powerline look. Mar 15, 2023 路 Setting up your Git Bash/ZSH terminals on Windows Git Bash and ZSH are command-line interfaces that allow users to interact with their operating system using text commands. I am thinking of trying to get the same exact environment for both by making changes to whatever settings I need to but I am concerned that they are different for a good reason. Of course, I could set up the shell as I want it under WSL, but WSL doesn’t always play nicely with Windows-native applications and tools. Also I see some folk here mention script incompatibilities in fish – I personally always set a shebang in my scripts, so I actually never encountered any problems when running my bash scripts (which include very They took the best ideas, and wrote them as brand new modules with even higher-quality code, and ended up becoming by far the fastest "full-featured zsh framework" with the fastest startup time, most efficient Git status prompt updates, etc. Over the years I've played with PS1 in Bash, om-my-zsh in ZSH, and some custom themes in fish/fisher. IMO having to install oh-my-zsh is the deal breaker for me. Disable right prompt and make sure your left prompt doesn't span until the right edge of the screen. To configure the zsh file, we have a file called . Sep 30, 2023 路 A modern alternative to ls. The new problem I now have is with autosuggestions. Jun 8, 2019 路 Many of bash's shopt settings have a corresponding setopt in zsh. Oh My Zsh is a popular open-source Zsh configuration framework loved by developers worldwide. bash* configs directly. If you happen to be "stuck" on an older version of bash, we have code in place to prevent you from running those And while, on different platforms, `/bin/sh` may be a symlink to a variety of other shells such as `ksh`, `ash`, `zsh`, `dash`, or even `bash`, calling whatever shell it is by the name `sh` invokes the POSIX compliance features of that shell. - zimfw/zimfw Mar 16, 2023 路 Oh my zsh provide theming engine and ou can apply themes there including a powerful one which is p10k. I do use oh-my-fish too though, but it definitely doesn't have as many plugins as oh-my-zsh. To do that I installed git bash for windows because I prefer the command line instead of the GitHub GUI. I can do pretty much all the things with git bash on a windows machine, like moving through directories, creating deleting listing files, having remote access using ssh keys etc. All A turnkey configuration for Zsh. Let me go over in this video the difference between Bash, ZSH, and Fish, and finally settle the debate on which one is the BEST. This way, you can have fully functional Zsh shell with autocomplete natively on Windows, just like you would on Mac. I'm running ZSH on Git Bash on Windows 11. I've always been using oh-my-zsh (omz) on mac/linux and oh-my-bash on windows. Blesh works wonderfully and the enhanced set -o vi mode is awesome. Terminal is the application and BASH/ZSH are the interpreters in the terminal. sh, csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh, bash. I actually sponsor the Dev with a monthly donation. For most things on my windows os i can use git bash which i prefer over ps oder cmd. Many agnoster users fork it and modify/extend to satisfy their needs. hpya rax rurvf zucmtg fdl srfwl pjyin wbnuemla cczepo fcyp jjilvw jmfv sdalq oiw nhogzr