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:
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/bash-shell.png)
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:
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/01-first-time-with-zsh.png)
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/02-first-time-menu-2.png)
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/03-history-config-after-Ive-already-increased-the-history-value.png)
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/04-configuring-comprehensive-configuration.png)
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/05-comprehensive-completion-options-I-wont-go-deeper-screenshot-wise.png)
Big change I made was changing directories just by typing the directory name. In the end, things looked exactly the same.
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/06-zsh-with-powerline.png)
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.
![](http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/07-showing-all-the-options-for-a-command.png)