For those wondering why Apple is allergic to GPLv3 code: there is a clause in the license requiring you provide a way to run modified version of the software which would require Apple to let users self sign executables.
zsh is the default shell on all of my machines because I make it so. I think the tab completions that ohmyzsh provides have saved me on the order of 40 hrs / year, and helped me learn new APIs much easier, since you can see all options without the --help.<p>If you haven't tried it, I cannot recommend zsh + plugins enough. Only install that you actually use, otherwise it can slow start time a bunch.<p>Here is a list of the plugins that are available:
<a href="https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/Plugins" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/Plugins</a><p>I especially appreciate git+git-extras, web-search (`google my query`), docker, npm, and dirhistory.
Guess they had to go somewhere as Apple's unwillingness to have GPLv3 code effectively killed off bash updates.<p>Slightly disappointed, but guess they had to go somewhere and zsh is going to be well supported going forward
Ooh, and they're throwing in dash too!<p>> To test script compatibility with Bourne-compatible shells in macOS Catalina, you can change /var/select/sh to /bin/bash, /bin/dash, or /bin/zsh. If you change /var/select/sh to a shell other than bash, be aware that scripts that make use of bashisms may not work properly.
It's probably because the default bash is a very ancient version before FSF transitioned to GPLv3. That said, I've been using zsh for a long time and this is a great change.
While Apple is at modernizing their POSIX userland, they should also consider other ancient software they're using. For example, last I looked on Apple's Darwin Open Source site (about a year or two ago), they shipped a really old and buggy awk (nawk) version.
I've never worked outside bash. I have a lot of simple bash scripts. (Usually just stringing together commands with the occasional pipe or output to file)<p>Will this break all those or are bash scripts and zsh scripts basically interchangeable?
zsh is better than bash in nearly all aspects, at least in my use cases, so this is a great news for me. Is there anything that can be done in bash but not in zsh?
From 2012 - Apple's great GPL purge: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990</a><p>Short-sighted move considering Microsoft is actively looking to ship a Linux kernel in Windows.
I switched to ZSH a few years ago because some of my coworkers were using it. I never found it useful enough to use it over Bash. So I switched back to Bash. I’d rather have the shell be identical to the one running on the servers I use.
As a happy zsh user, I'm glad that this will finally force every application and software package in the world to stop assuming that bash is the default (and only) shell.
Finally!<p>Though I will say I’m surprised. I’ve opened a radar suggesting this change and it was closed with (paraphrasing) “won’t do it as the user can easily change the shell, I myself do it”.
I had trouble updating iTunes once because my shell was set to zsh, and it took me quite a while to debug what went wrong. I recommend that when this switchover occurs, users should temporarily switch to bash if they encounter an installer that does not work.
I've noticed that sometimes there's oddities with zsh & homebrew or rvm that force me to drop into bash in order to run a command. With apple standardizing on zsh, that should finally resolve these bugs.
zsh users, good time to try out my favorite prompt, Pure: <a href="https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure</a><p>Nowadays that's the only thing I run on top of zsh, which makes the shell significantly faster than with oh-my-zsh (and its kitchen sink).