Why I Switched Back to Bash, And Why You Should Too

Today I talk about my recent switch away from ZSH and to Bash.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

===== Follow us 🐧🐧 ======

==== Special Thanks to Our Patrons! ====

#bash #zsh #thelinuxcast

[minigpracing]

Of course a tutorial on making bash "more useful" would be welcome.

[milohoffman]

As someone who came from the UNIX world, I can tell you bash is a fantastic full featured shell compared to the Bourne sh shell we used back then.

[thedeemon]

I'm not a fan of spending days configuring things, I'm a simple man who enjoys things preconfigured, maybe with just a little tiny bit of tweaking. So when Manjaro gave me a beautiful zsh configuration out of the box, with good autocomplete, nice prompt with git info, showing timing and result code of each program I run, I was very happy and remain happy still. It works fast and well, so kudos to people who made it. Once you have a good working config, no reason to change it.

[the_linux_legend]

I know that a lot of people will go to zsh or fish because of the syntax highlighting and autocompletion which is nice. But bash actually has this as well, it is a project called blesh and it makes bash probably better than zsh and maybe even fish. This project is the reason ive been using bash for 3 years now.

[stulora]

I started with bash (the reasonable shell 20 sth years ago), and when zsh and fish became a thing, I was really excited. New features, the next step, everything shiny, I'm in!!

And then I noticed that I was less productive, because I could do everything I wanted in bash, without learning the small and not so small differences between bash and the others.

So I went back to bash, found oh my bash, found blesh, and never looked back.

That said, I think zsh and fish really pushed bash related projects, which is good. Kudos to the devs on all sides.

[esra_erimez]

I prefer using bash on my workstations because its on most server I need to ssh into and my muscle memory is used to it.

[phonewithoutquestion]

Currently on Fish. Yeah, it heavily leans _away_ from POSIX, but whatever. It's comfortable, and easier for me to restart configurations if I need to. I could pull up bash if I needed it for a very sensitive operation that calls for it anyhow. Anyways hope the summer's been treating you well. :)

[MIInDsEthiopia]

drop a tutorial on the bash configuration, until that happens i am going to stay on zsh

[gwgux]

Bash is great and tends to be underrated by those who switch to zsh and fish for the "cool factor" instead of specific features, but to each their own. I spend most of my time in bash when I'm on a terminal as it's usually for working on a server and servers should generally follow the "less is more" approach so I don't normally install additional shells on them.

On my home PC I use zsh, but that's for tinkering, not serious work so any slowdowns from plugins really doesn't bother me with it. Bash is my work horse while others are for tinkering and fun.

[shatterstone]

Hey Matt, I used to use fish, but I got tired of some random POSIX thing not working and having to switch to bash for a single command, so I recently made the switch to zsh, replicating all the features of fish into zsh. Now I don't use oh my zsh, because it is just too slow. But even without it, there is a slight, but noticeable speed decrease compared to fish. I didn't even consider bash as an option, so now that you reminded me of it, I think I'll just try to configure bash in the same way, and hope for the best.

[Little-bird-told-me]

Fish for user interface and bash for scripting. I am surprised you say fish is weird. Fish is so easy and out of the box fully featured.

[chuckmuckamuck]

Not really about the video, but the window manager looks fantastic.

[EricMurphyxyz]

Good video. Might be time to try bash again. I've never had any big complaints using zsh, but I have noticed slow startup speeds sometimes for whatever reason (even without oh-my-zsh).

[DominikZogg]

I switched to zsh cause its also available on macos, so i can use the same config everywhere.

[cosmiccuttlefish]

I never really understood why zsh really took off. It doesn’t seem add much over bash or as much as something like fish.

[fleurcode]

Zsh is my new friend literally just for completion. I don't need 17 plugins, i just want to see the git thing and completion and better history keeping

[sweetbabyalaska]

Zsh with starship, zoxide, fzf-tab complete, zsh-syntax highlighting, auto-suggestions and a few lesser known zstyle settings is insanely good... Maybe I'll post my config because I cannot use bash anymore... its noticeably worse as an interactive shell. I use it for scripting because its universal and ShellCheck / bash-language-server work with it. Oh-my-zsh is just horrible and it provides nothing of note. "plugins" are just sourcing zsh scripts and you can do that yourself. You also need to set you ZDOTDIR to somewhere else than home.

[tipeon]

I've used both over the last two decades. For servers at work, I leave everything default (even if that default is ksh). For scripting, I stay on bash for compatibility. For my personal computers, it's zsh with just the git plugin, and a pretty prompt on the right. (I like the left prompt to always be the same size, so current dir and branch go to the right)

[kooroshhm]

Completely agreed. Shouldn't I spend a little bit of time on learning about the previous reliable choices, how to use them properly, extending them and at last know how to deal with the issues I find and try to improve that entity's quality and share it with others. Thank you for the very eye opening podcast.

[Ferran-Gnu-Linux]

A few years ago we only had xterm and after urxvt, we must to configure all the presentation of a terminal emulator (prompt, colors, background, font, size, alias, etc) into bashrc or xrsesources. In other side, with Bash we learned script doing agenda, notes, editors, wget manager and thousand more things. We learned Bash we can.