Hello:
So Apple just announced it's switching from Bash to Zsh for their default shell; seems to be more a licensing issue. I looked in these forums, and the posts I found of advocates of zsh seem old, so it doesn't seem to be a ground-swell.

My quick research since the announcement doesn't seem to show a ground-swell of support building over time has occurred in *nix-land either.

My quick research seems to lead me to believe that zsh does bash very well, so one can effortlessly and transparently switch, nothing will break, so one can then learn what zsh does better/faster/differently/more-wonderfully over time.

So my questions are:
* What do y'all think of Apple's move?
* What do you think of zsh?
* Has anyone moved to zsh, then experientially thought better of it and moved back.
* Etc.

zsh is rather good and if I were starting out or making a distro, I'd probably use it as my main shell. Bash is, however, the established default and I am quite lazy in thay way. Though I do try to write my shell scripts at least in POSIX style.

As to Apple's decision? I think they're making the right choice for some very wrong reasons and those reasons will come to bite them and us hard later. It seems part of their role in the ongoing war against general-purpose computing. I used to be rather a fan but nowadays I despise the Apple products since their quality went to crap and their walled garden approach went too far. For a while, they were looking very good, but somewhere around Snow Leopard they seemed to peak in regards to system and software quality. About a year before Steve Jobs died, even the hardware took a turn for the worse.

General purpose computing is predicated on software freedom more than most people realize or admit. While zsh is a great shell, if it is part of Apple's further repositioning against software freedom, then it hurts us as well as them.

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I use zsh as my shell in FreeBSD and I love it. Now I have to caveat that with I am not a scripter so my usage is just as an interactive shell. Not sure it will matter to most Apple users who probably have zero clue what a shell even is.

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