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Why Oh My ZSH is so cool?

Camilo Martinez on March 04, 2023

There is a before and after listening to these letters together: ZSH. You may wonder: Why did not I hear about this before? D'oh! ZSH (Z Shell) it...
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Tiago Nobrega

PowerLevel10k is nice... but have you tried starship? starship.rs/

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Camilo Martinez

Nop I didn't, should I?

It seems to be faster. What other cool things have?
Do they have an easy step configuration like p10k?

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crisz

I just installed it and... how the hell I was able to install a so much pervasive tool without sudo?
By the way it's super cool!

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Camilo Martinez

It's because is a framework that runs over ZSH (just adding utilities).

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krlz

thanks for sharing

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Nacho Colomina Torregrosa

Thanks for sharing, let's give it a try :)

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Marcelo Arias

I love Oh My Zsh! 😁

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johnsmoth21

I love oh-my-zsh I have been using it for years.
Have you tried oh-my-fish?

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Camilo Martinez • Edited

No, I've listened some times on podcasts about it. But I haven't tried it.

Should I?

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Ben Sinclair

The majority of things people promote about zsh are things that are also available in any other shell. I think the joy of finding out about a new feature eclipses everything else, and there are so many posts talking about it that it feels like it really must be unique to zsh.

I'm pretty sure the reason people go on about zsh being better than bash is because so many developers were stuck using MacOS for so long, where Apple only used bash v3 because they didn't want to include anything with GPL3 in their OS. Modern versions of bash (i.e. anything after version 4 which came out about 8 or 9 years ago) have the double-star globbing, for example. Developers were deliberately kept in the dark about this by Apple, and so when they switched to zsh (which uses the MIT license) people started comparing it to the massively out-of-date version of bash. Anyone using any other OS with bash (WSL, Windows with git-bash, Linux, *BSD...) was probably up-to-date and didn't see what the fuss was.

zsh does have some nice things, but it also has some frustrations not present in other shells. I find the default command recall to be very annoying, for instance.

Most of the "plugins" are things that work outside omz, but which have been packaged as a plugin, that's all. You don't need to restrict yourself to using omz, and you don't need to install an entire framework to get something you could install on its own.

For instance, Powerlevel10k is its own thing. It doesn't need to be managed by omz - rather than use plugins for omz, use it directly, or use something else - like starship perhaps.

I don't want to say, "don't use it", but I do want to say that most of the zsh workflow is down to personal preference, and most of the omz stuff is just bloat.

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Camilo Martinez • Edited

Totally agree. For me, the good thing about the ZSH, Fish, and the other new shell is that gives us an alternative to choose from. Even bash starts to improve because of that including some features from other shells, but I still missing the hooks feature that it's already included on ZSH.

It's totally true about mac users, a little know that you can install manually. In my case, I use the new bash in the default terminal and zsh on iTerm.

As you mention we don't need the OMZ or P10K, like we don't need frameworks for development, but we use them because his "time-saving" and because are easy to use and config.

The good thing about all of this is that we have alternatives to choose and we can decide what shell or framework to use.

By the way, I'm going to take a look at the starship alternative.

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Andreas Herz

You should try out Warp terminal. It has really nice features like AI completion & command search 👌🏽

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Camilo Martinez • Edited

Wrap terminal looks amazing, sadly I'm actually working with Windows and it is not available yet.

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adriens

testing is adopting !

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