As a Linux user, I've always just used bash because it was the default on every distro I used. People using other Unix systems such as BSD seem to use other shells far more frequently. In the interests of learning a bit more, I've decided to try out zsh.

As a bash user:

• What features will I miss?


• And what ones should I look out for?

There's already been quite a bit of activity on the topic on other Stack Exchange sites. My experience of switching from bash to zsh, as far as can remember (it was years ago²), is that I didn't miss a single thing. I gained a lot; here are what I think are the simple zsh-specific features that I use most:

• _{The zsh feature I most miss when I occasionally use bash is autocd: in zsh, executing a directory means changing to it, provided you turn on the autocd option.⁴}




• Another very useful feature is the fancy globbing. The hieroglyphscharacters are a bit hard to remember but extremely convenient (as in, it's often faster to look them up than to write the equivalent find command). A few of the simpler examples:
  
      foo*~*.bak = all matches for foo* except those matching *.bak

    foo*(.) = only regular files matching foo*

    foo*(/) = only directories matching foo*

    foo*(-@) = only dangling symbolic links matching foo*

    foo*(om[1,10]) = the 10 most recent files matching foo*

    foo*(Lm+1) = only files of size > 1MB
      _{dir/**/foo* = foo* in the directory dir and all its subdirectories, recursively⁴}




• For fancy renames, the zmv builtin can be handy. For example, to copy every file to file.bak: zmv -C '(*)(#q.)' '$1.bak'




• Both bash and zsh have a decent completion system that needs to be turned on explicitly (. /etc/bash_completion or autoload -U compinit; compinit). Zsh's is much more configurable and generally fancier.

If you run zsh without a .zshrc, it starts an interactive menu that lets you choose configuration options. (Some distributions may disable this; in that case, run autoload zsh-newuser-install; zsh-newuser-install.) I recommend enabling the recommended history options, turning on (“new-style”) completion, and turning on the “common shell options” except beep. Later, configure more options as you discover them.

²_{At the time programmable completion was zsh's killer feature, but bash acquired it soon after.}

⁴_{Features that bash acquired only in version 4 (so are still not available on many systems) are in smaller type.}

Also the default tab completion is better than bash... for example...

~/.e.dTAB will expand to ~/.emacs.d/ in zsh, bash will just beep.

zsh lets you edit a multi-line command (see zsh line editor), bash doesn't. If you try the same trick (Ctrl-p), bash fetches the last command.

Bash has the feature of being able to open ports using

/dev/tcp/host/port

or

/dev/udp/host/port

However, it is disabled in Debian as it is seen as a hindrance (if the path actually exists) and outside the scope of what a shell should do. More information [debian mailing list]

Which - enhanced in zsh

The which command in bash only reveals the location of a command.

In Zsh which will reveal the definition of an alias, the source for a function and the location of a command.

Let's say we had a shell alias:

alias gg='git log'

In Bash if we asked: which gg the result would be void

In Zsh: which gg will give us...

gg: aliased to git log

Let's say we had a shell function:

hello() {

    echo "Hello World"

}

In Bash if we asked: which hello the result would be void.

In Zsh: which hello will give us...

hello() {

    echo "Hello World"

}