However, it was conceived for extensibility and flexibility in general, in the spirit of [6]. It has been used also for scripting CPU frequency scaling, debugging, application sandboxing among others [7,8].
I switched a few years ago and while there's a lot to like about (and power in) zsh, there's a lot i really dislike about it. For starters, it adds so much additional functionality and compatibility that the documentation (man pages are terrible). Also, the additional history & variable expansion capabilities are messy/ugly in shell syntax (imho). I think ultimately the problem is that, for shell scripting, bash has clearly won, but other shells show that there's room for an alternative specifically for a user's interactive interface...but zsh didn't get the memo so is trying to be all things to all people. One of these days, i'll probably swing over to fish...if I can get the energy to change my environment yet again.
> Aside from it being bash (a great reason not to use it as far as I’m concerned) it’s now a 17 years old version of bash.
I thought people liked macOs for its vintage feel? Remember a time when computers could only render a single menu bar in a fixed location, feel the experience of SYN floods, run a version of bash that is old enough to vote in the next presidential election.
Honestly this is such a waste of time every time I have to argue with developers about installing up to date homebrew (or whatever) versions of the coreutils that I wish Apple would simply DELETE all these ancient versions of tools from MacOS.
As a bonus, homebrew does not offer --with-default-names any more and some tools (like make) are posted into different paths so you need to add your own symlinks or add multiple paths to your PATH.
According to the interwebs, zsh became default with Catalina in 2019 [1]; ten years after bash 4 was released with gpl v3 or later.
Also, the interwebs suggest Apple used to use tcsh as the default shell[2]; I don't know when they changed that, but it may have been after bash 4 released? (Thanks, 10.3 was in 2003, so several years before the license changed)
