Want more Linux content? Give me a follow over on Mastodon! fosstodon.org/@thelinuxcast

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

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

But I like nushell more

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.

This is pretty much my experience as well. I switched away from alternate shells when I realized bash can already do all that. In chasing the KISS principle, I forgot actually keep things simple and keeping the default components.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

Thanks for what you do, I enjoy it, it's great.

I have been considering switching to zsh because o work on a project with some developers who work on Mac, and I keep forgetting that I have to test every bash script on MacOS to make sure I haven’t used any features that the native bash on MacOS will never have. If my scripts are all for zsh, then they will work the same on all platforms (that have zsh installed). I haven’t actually tried making that switch or actually using zsh at all yet though. Does my reasoning seem right or wrong?

I'd like the tutorial for personalizing bash that you mentioned

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)

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.

is your .bashrc with customisations available?

Can Zsh's Esc-e shortcut be replicated on bash? That and the tab autoselect are what keep me on zsh. Though I would love to move back to bash as I think I've found commands that work in bash but not zsh because of Zsh's globbing/expansion features, and on bash ". " is equivalent to source but it is not on zsh

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

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

Yes 😊

Definitely would like a tutorial. Especially on the history search. I figured that out once, but never saved it in the bashrc for some reason and I haven’t been able to figure it out again.

From someone who transitioned from Windows 98 (Cygwin) to RedHat 1.0 then MacOS 9.5 due to BASH, I felt this video was fuzzy and warm. Currently on a MBA 13" M2 and still using BASH for a crap-load of reasons. I get weather info the same way I did 25 years ago, format it the same way, and it works. I get news headlines the same way I figured out 15 years ago and most RSS news feeds still work, and there they are!. My email notifications, server scripts, and so much more were figured out when I was younger, and if it ain't broke ... don't fix it. $0.02

There are several Bash shell prompt generators on the net that can cut the time to make your personal one by hand probably in half or more.

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.

We use the Korn shell across our various unix flavours of dev machines at work so that would be my shell of choice at home too, however, ksh is marked as unstable in my Linux distribution, so in the interests of stability I too use Bash, however I have "set -o vi" in my .bashrc which enables command line editing in a way that is familiar to me.

I want a tutorial on customize bash

I used Bash and refused to change for over a decade, and actually just switched to zsh in the past year. The plugins from Oh-My-Zsh are all over-engineered and need to be used sparingly. For the most part, it is better to just copy over the parts of them that you need into your .zshrc file. Sometimes I just want some extra completions for sub-commands of s specific program, and not 900 aliases, which is a common thing for zsh plugins. Either way, I don't care what shell anyone uses. The point of Linux is freedom to choose, so I am happy that you are happy being back with Bash, and I am equally happy with the people still content using zsh, fish, etc. I am not a paid sponsor of Bash, therefore see little reason to tell people to switch to it.

I have a question regarding bash and zsh scripting: if I work in an enterprise, should I rather use bash (for scripting) instead of zsh? (Some scripts using zsh are not running on bash?). Thank you for your answer 😀

Agreed. I still prefer zsh for select few things bash doesn't support, but it's not much(of what I use myself, it does support a good deal more though, just often not the general quoted stuff lol, where bash could same if configured). It's not slower for me, neither known as such generally, the opposite actually, but neither use ohmyzsh as you said.

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

A tutorial on bash would be beneficial. Many thanks for your consideration.

Didn't Jack@Linux make some videos on how to do the same Zsh stuff in bash and some scripts? You might want to check them out. I use Zsh because I have prompts I like and have them rotate each time I open a terminal and the stuff you showed in the video. I think Jake figured out how to do that with a script, I might be wrong. 🤔 Thanks Matt! LLAP 🖖

I use Tilix, the Tiling Linux Terminal. Great to keep related work together in one tiled Window :)

I never had any slowness in zsh but I dont use any frameworks like OMZ. I just have syntax highlight and autocomplete plugins and everything else is in my .zshrc. If you use custom prompts like starship they can slow down any shell dramatically if you have lot going on there.

I use zsh, but without any frameworks, instead I have my own framework like config which lazy-loads plugins and it’s super fast (at least to my eyes) It is to a point that it’s really hard for me to switch shells (call it shell lock-in) 😅

Can you post your bash config ? Thank you!

Yeah, make a vid about how you added these features.

can you share that prompt? looks amazing

Since it. Has been 9 months and I haven't see a video of. Improving the bash terminal would this be in the pipeline for future video?

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

Please make a video showing how you moved those features to Bash 🚀 Awesome video!

I use bash (always have) and it does have tab completion even for incomplete words. Have to check what I did to enable that cause I can't remember though.

These zsh related files can be set to a different location quite easily, ```export ZSH_COMPDUMP=$HOME/.cache/.zcompdump-$HOST export HISTFILE=~/.zsh_history```. I personally use the zsh thing where u tab through options a lot, like really a lot, if bash had that i would switch, but till then i stay with zsh and oh-my-zsh for sure, but still nice video, didnt knew that bash could do the thing with the history and non-case-sensitive tab completion.

What does Matt uses as his DE and WM? I can see he's using OpenSuse as the distro. I like how simple & minimalistic the layout on his screen is.

Syntax input highlighting??

I can't find how you did cd + up and showing the last command with cd, would love to see a tutorial of it.

Awesome vid!....I myself have found that aside from changing the font and its "weight"?.(so that its bold and thick)...there's not much I wanna do to my Bash shell in Fedora or Linux Mint

Thank you for cd up. Sometimes better than ctrl+r.

I recently switched from Arch to Debian. I had long ago switched to zsh with a few useful plugin scripts but not using Oh my zsh or any other helper. Just syntax highlighting, history search, cli prompt etc. The new debian install was basic bash and while I intended not to install zsh this time, I found it's basic setup instantly annoying and I missed my tweaked setup. As before, using the z shell doesn't mean foregoing bash scripting. All my scripts were always in bash. All I was using zsh for was the user shell. Possibly I could have set up something similar in bash, but since all my configs were sitting in a backup, it was just easier to install zsh and restore the needed dot files than build a working set for bash that might give me only some of the functionality back.

6:04 for example, `< filename.txt` to view file contents is a zsh thing, not POSIX. and bash doesn't have that.

Can we also get highlighted command suggestion like fish does when you start typing anything... Like when you type something, suggest a command complition in different color, and if you misspelt then change color indicating that this is not a command

I switched back on macOS, too. The main reason was that I only switched to macOS to have a convenient platform with Bash.

For me it's because zsh broke too many of my configurations and scripts. I'm an old-school unix user starting form SunOS way back in 1998 and the Solaris, Tru64, HPUX before installing Linux on my own computer (these days I'm a mix of macOS and Linux). My sell configs and personal scripts start from those SunOS/Solaris days and have been with me for over 2 decades. I "finalized" my preferred terminal setup some time around 2015. Tried to configure zsh to fit with my config and spent 2 days doing it and failing. I gave up and switched back to bash. The only reason I used zsh in the first place? It's the default shell on newer macOS installs.

Didn't know about Oh My BASH, but if you are into that stuff, there's also bash-it

I so so wanted to stick with bash, but a company laptop which is a Macbook is having ZSH by default. I don’t want to maintain separate dotfiles for both shells so I have to switch to ZSH. I set it up from scratch without oh-my-zsh and I can tell it’s much slower than bash.

good 👍

I like fish along with OMF. I won't go back. The big downside is the minor scripting language differences.

It's bash really faster or it's your zsh configuration was bulky? I mean you're talking about noticable problems with cd-ing and omz so I guess the problem might be solved simply by turning some things off? I personally find the zsh more useful by default especially on servers. Bash on newly created machine is just a pain. So I install zsh and... I don't even install plugins, it works okay already. So for me bare zsh is better then bare bash. And if I go with zsh in servers why should I do other way on personal machine?

vim and bash because they're everywhere you go - and you need to be able to do it anywhere

I stared out in sh and ksh back in the day so bash was a natural progression for me so I've always stuck with it. Like you say, many systems scripts I've crafted over time have started with #!/usr/bin/bash or similar so why would use zsh in my shell but I still tried it out particularly when I had to use a mac. Thats where I think zsh comes in as I believe, someone correct me but I believe mac froze the version of bash in their os, so you would always have an old ferclunkey version of bash on mac unless you brew installed a modern ( current ) one. I dont know for sure now as I've not checked, could be wrong on how it is right now. But I like concentraing on what is on most linux systems anyways so my productivity stays high. Learning shortcuts in bash like cntrl-r to find commands in the history work everywhere there is bash, I dont need zsh to be set up so why need to change my workstation to be different ? Interesting video, comment and expose of bash and its merits, thanks. I'm off to look at oh my bash now - you made me do it ! ;)

Would be great if you share solution for tab-completion and partial-compleation. Thanls.

One reason I like using bash is the same as a reason I like using Vim: it (or something compatible with it) comes on almost every linux machine

Real PROs know it’s about functionality AND standards, not just allure, gimmicks or looks! (All systems have sh, csh and bash).

I think it was kali that made the default shell zsh. Confused the hell out of me for quite some time... I've modified .bashrc and .bash_aliases files to allow me to customize how bash works. Works for me...

I was thinking about this recently. I mostly use zsh as a themes manager, save for a few real plugins. On the real plug ins thing, I looked at what many of them are - premade aliases - if i am using it often i would just make my own with a name i will actually remember.

My zsh startups in few miliseconds. Bash is slower for me. I use zsh-defer and pull only needed ozs plugins via my gotfile manager and source them manually with zsh-defer. Also I prefer to use zsh-autosuggestions, which is impossible on bash right now. Also zsh out of box has good color support, separate binaries/aliases/files during tab complete. If you spend some time and understand how zsh works iit give you much more power compare to old bash

I like Zsh features more, because they are easier to configure. In terms of speed of execution commands - they both are the same. Also, I never used OZSH or any other ready to use "improver" of Zsh. Therefore I had never seen any performance issue of Zsh. Anyway, shell scripts I use are written for POSIX compliant shell, I avoid writing scripts for Bash or Zsh. If I have trouble with POSIX compliant scripts - I just write script in Python.

I've used both and love them both. But these days I just use zsh because the distro I mainly use for work uses zsh and it does the job I need it to and like the consistency.

I've pretty much exclusively used ZSH on Linux. I'd consider myself a rather advanced user, with over 100_000 executed commands logged, and probably like 1000+ hours of just fucking around with shell features and stupidly long pipelines at this point. My scripts are also pretty much all #!/bin/zsh, except the few that are so minimal and portable I can do #!/bin/sh for. I use stock ZSH, no patches, no plugins besides ZSH Syntax Highlighting, no frameworks, integration hooks for my terminal emulator (WezTerm) and history manager (Atuin), and then a 500 line handwritten config on my current machine (old one was 700. This is only counting my primary interactive configuration file.). I tried BASH recently when I made a new user. It was an awful experience. BASH might largely be able to match what I do in ZSH, but ZSH is so much more sensible and just better, and really the only reason IMHO to ever use BASH over ZSH is that BASH is more widespread (and that the improvements of ZSH can cause significant bugs if trying to use it as BASH code). That's it. Otherwise there wouldn't even be a reason for me to have BASH on my machine, let alone actually use it. Also there are definite places where besides just having the better defaults, it has extremely useful functionality. example complex ZSH command of mine from a few days ago (this one deletes a round of GNU cp's file backups if they're identical. Constructed this because duperemove wasn't working correctly): ```zsh yes | for file in /run/user/1000/no-atime_mb/DH/norp/mir/**.\~#\~(.); do prev_ver="${file:r}$(n="$(( "$(rgft1 '\.~(\d+)~$'

If bash can get zsh's interactive tab complete, I'll come back

Why did Apple make zsh the default in Mac OS then?

ZSH is not compatible with my workflow. I resent the likes of Manjaro and Mint changing the default to zsh. It breaks things and it makes it harder to provide help to newbies (or not-so-newbies) as now you have to give extra commands to switch to a BASH session and back, which is an extra hurdle for them to trip over. Like you point out, the BASH prompt can be customized .. like mine, which makes it easy to see at a glance which machine and user account I'm logged in to.

If there is a shebang, the script will run with that program. That’s the whole point of shebang. OMG, the video shouts “i don’t know what the hack i am doing” 🤦‍♂️

I will be thrilled if you do a video on how you ended up with a terminal like that. Also, a fan boy of Opensuse Tumbleweed (I know, don't mean anything). 😅 Thank you

you should do a video comparing bash, zsh and fish.

So...did we ever get a how-to on this?!

I switched from zsh because it was crashing on my not-so-complex git and docker scripts. Bash was rock solid. Regarding eye candy, I don’t need that either, my bash prompt is PS1=“\w ->” and that’s all I need, really.

Tbh. The main reason of why I switched to zsh, was to make the prompt look like that simple ~>. But if I can do it with bash too, and some other things, then I can also switch back to bash. Just like I turned off all plugins in vim, and just used basic vimrc commands, like you have shown in previous videos. I'm slowly coming back to defaults. I'll just now will have to see, how to uninstall oh-my-zsh and zsh, and then, how to do some of zsh things in bash, as I completely don't know any coding language.

Is it stll bash or now dash ?

👍

I use fish anyways

tutorial on your desktop theme pls

I am an avid fish enjoyer

I currently use zsh for interactive shell only and use bash for all the scripting.

Tokyo drift is a masterpiece!

Fish is truly weird, I'll love it!

The great thing about Bash is that it's already installed in nearly every Linux environment you'll come across (I'm sure someone could prove me wrong on that). Why should I use a shell that I'll need to install on every new system and every new VM I use?

I never understood zsh to begin with, it is PITA to configure (I can't remember exactly what the problem was). Just use bash, and install bash-completion, your prompt is in bashrc, you don't need anything else... I even tried ksh for couple of weeks, but it was too limiting, like vi instead of vim.

In my opinion if one wants to switch then might aswell to fish instead of zsh since neither of them are POSIX compliant but fish is way lighter and faster.

BASED

IDK man. I mean, with the exception of the functions, or whatever, that actually require bash to work properly, I'm not sure why I'd need bash of zsh when fish exists.

Bash does everything I need. I've tried zsh briefly, but being a non-default shell it doesn't come preconfigured like bash and I didn't want to put in the effort to do it myself. And Bash is certainly better than ksh or csh. So no need to switch.

I want the tutorial. Also.. I want a long term review of Rhino Linux

Hey Matt!! I really love your content but sometimes i think that you really don't even have the slightest of idea of idea on what you actually want. You are a Distro Hopper and you should stay one. Sorry about this comment but that's what i feel.