This is, of course, a reply to Devan’s post about the Z shell, as I was one of the curious folks always bugging him about why he used it.
First, the one advantage I know of that zsh has over bash: It lets me say “The Zed Shell” which is great fun down here in North Carolina.
The default keybinding for interactive command history search is ctrl-r
(search backward through the history). This command prompts for input, rather
than using what has already been typed. You can set up history search like zsh
has with:
$ bind ctrl-p:history-search-backward
$ bind ctrl-n:history-search-forward
Intelligent tab completion is enabled by default in most linux distributions, if not, you probably just have to comment out a line in your bashrc, or install a bash-completion package.
Devan’s right; bash has all of the directory stack features that he listed for zsh.
alias -g and alias -s do seem to be unique to zsh. You’ve won this round, Zed Shell.
In bash, you can also use the ! to recall command history with find and replace.
**vim /file.py will open the first file named file.py in your directory tree in bash, too.
zsh does have a few more features than bash. I have yet to see anything revolutionary enough to make me switch shells. Unfortunately for zsh, it has an uphill battle against all of the test systems I work with that come pre- installed with bash.