On most operating systems, the default command line shell is Bash. Bash is a perfectly good shell. However there are a number of tasks that are slow or annoyingly time-consuming in Bash, particularly relating to the shell history. It's like using your phone to complete tasks, instead of a laptop.

Zsh is a newer terminal shell with slightly different syntax than Bash. Zsh makes many smart usability decisions where Bash fails, helping you get work done faster. I thought I'd highlight some of the best examples.

ZSH skips repeat commands in history. Let's say I run our unit test suite 20 times in a row. With Bash, if I wanted to get the command I ran just before that, I'd have to hit the up arrow 21 times to get the previous line. Zsh combines all the duplicate commands into one history item, so you only have to press 'up' twice to get that old command.

Ctrl+U deletes the whole line, no matter where the cursor is. In Bash Ctrl+U will delete everything left of the cursor. I have never wanted to delete everything left of the cursor without also deleting the whole line.

Command sensitive history. In Zsh if I type git and then press 'up', Zsh will cycle through all of my latest git commands, skipping any non-git commands. This is especially useful with a few infrequent commands I run that take many command line options, such as our configuration scripts.

Shared history across tabs. With Bash, using the 'up' arrow to access previous commands only gives you access to the history of the current tab. This is like having Chrome only remember your history for one given tab, instead of sharing it across all your tabs.

Smarter tab completion out of the box. Zsh is smart about figuring out which filenames you actually want. There's a good list of tab completion examples here, the two that stand out for me are:

• Typing

  rm foo*<tab> 
  

  will expand to

  rm foo.txt foo.txt.swp foo.o foo.c
  

  or however many files beginning with foo there are in the directory.

• Typing

  vim zzz<tab>
  

  will match in the middle of files, for example blah-blah-blah-zzz.txt.

You should give it a try - it may be a little unfamiliar at first, but you'll save a lot of time and annoyance by completing tasks more quickly with Zsh. You can switch by typing at the Bash command prompt:

$ zsh

That will load Z Shell in the current window. You can change your shell permanently by running:

$ chsh -s $(which zsh)

Let me know what you think!

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.