Like many, I have switched to zsh a few months back and have enjoyed the experience thanks to Oh-My-Zsh. I will give it a go, but I don't know if I can really appreciate the difference.
Sort of as others said, the nice thing about switching to zsh is that you get a lot of benefit _just_ by switching, and it is very similar in basic functioning to bash. It isn't like vim or emacs where you can't do basic tasks until you learn a bunch of specific keys.
This project's docs are way better than zsh.org, that's why. People actually find it informative and use it. Meaning you navigate to it, click around, put it on a side window, and use it while configuring zsh.
It may have better SEO as well, but the main point is that, to rise above the authoritative source, it actually also is performing way better in terms of user metrics.
Even if the answer is "none", zsh will need to additionally defend "what is the advantage of zsh for someone who already knows how to use bash", as any form of switch is going to come with a cost. I would therefore be really interested in your reasons (I use bash, as currently do all of the people I know and work with; [edit: apparently except one]).
It seems like most of the features listed as better than bash are either a) covered by bash 4.0, b) bad ideas (shared history among sessions), or c) only controversially better (searching around, people seem to argue back/forth about which programmable completion implementation is faster/better).
I spend a lot of time in the shell and it's so incredibly rare for what I'm doing to be limited by bash that it's hard to describe switching to zsh as anything other than a premature optimization.
Part of this is because I try to automate anything I do more than once or twice and I use a real language to do so. For anything non-trivial the differences between zsh and bash are an order of magnitude less significant than either compared with Python, Ruby, etc.
Personally I found zsh worth switching to even without spending any meaningful amount of time learning to use it. The better tab completion alone is enough to make up for the setup time and the occasional bashisms I try that don't work.
The only reason I moved to zsh is because I'm lazy, and macOS ships with it by default.
Easier to change my other systems to zsh than fight it, but I've not really done anything different except some minor notices that it seems to autocomplete a tiny bit better (but that may be due to oh my zsh).
For me the major improvement is that it puts the settings in the .config folder. I like this because I keep my settings in a git repo.
The main advantage on the other hand is that my friend stopped bothering me about having to switch to neovim, which I guess is a non-issue for most. Now he's trying to get me on to zsh.
reply