Trying out zsh (again, maybe?)

It’s been a very, very long time since I tried using a different shell than the bash shell. Back some 10-15 years ago I remember hearing about fish and trying it out. I think it broke some bash paradigms so I went back to bash. I could have sworn I tried zsh in the past, but I could be wrong. I know the last shell I tried out didn’t let me use ‘*’ during a dnf update to update all the packages that start with the same prefix, say all the 1500-ish texlive packages. That annoyed me so I went back to bash. If it was on this computer it was on a previous install or previous /home directory because I couldn’t find any evidence of zsh. No profiles or other such dot files that I could find. (Not that I looked too hard).

For comparison’s sake, this is how my bash shell looks:

I’ve cut off my username on the left

I’m using Powerline with the git extensions.

The setup was incredibly comprehensive. Here are a few screenshots showing the various menus of configuration options:

first time user. No idea how complex things will eventually get

The history configs after I’ve increased the save history

Completion system configs

Even deeper into the options

Big change I made was changing directories just by typing the directory name. In the end, things looked exactly the same.

zsh with powerline. Not a huge change.

I think the real benefit of zsh is the plugin system. And/or maybe some of the themes. Although I’m not sure how well it plays with powerline. It might be an either/or thing. I need to investigate further.

As I was changing my shell, I came across the command option display, which is AWESOME.

displaying command options!

• Bash
• Shell
• Zsh