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Zsh has had more features than bash for decades. If anything, bash has caught up recently.

It's just Apple using zsh as a default shell. People tend to use defaults and a lot more people are exposed to zsh now.



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> It's just Apple using zsh as a default shell.

Some developers have found out zsh before apple and customized it extensively. macOS switch just added fuel to the fire.


Indeed. I've switched to zsh a few years before it become a default on macs. If only I do not really remember what pushed me there, probably there was a wave of "zsh is awesome" sentiment over the internet.

The problem with ootb zsh is that it's weird. Even PS1 is not friendly

Then you start to feel insecure thinking it might be too weird and don't try it


>Then you start to feel insecure thinking it might be too weird and don't try it

Me (using fish): Hmmmmmm....


Yeah. I've gotten to the point where I hate tweaking things, and zsh feels like a pit of endless tweaks. I'm sure I could go dig up someone's package that has sane defaults, but, I ultimately don't care enough to do the work to vet _that_ configuration.

Hence, I'm on fish.


And I've already got a nice customized bashrc file. Maybe some of that comes out of the box with zsh (who admittedly I've only sort of tried), but not sure its worth the effort to change.

Yeah, fish has great defaults and behaviors that would take a bunch of plugins in zsh to achieve.

Combined with starship.rs, it's super easy to get a very nice shell with no config required.


>It's just Apple using zsh as a default shell. People tend to use defaults and a lot more people are exposed to zsh now.

That's a very recent change (1-2 years). ZSH has been extremely popular (and OMZ! etc), for a decade.


You are correct about the recent change but I think that Apple making the default change exposes a program like ZSH to many tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have no idea what a shell is. I'm sure there are many people around the world who wanted to achieve something on their Mac, found online to open "Terminal" noticed the shell said "Bash" or found something online about Bash scripts, or commands, etc and this leads them down a hole of learning. This can add a lot more than people would think.

I agree. I wouldn't have used `zsh` if not for MacOS. I still sometimes forget I am working in zsh when configuring things.

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