Sweet Shell: With Oh-My-Zsh, SpaceVim, Starship, True Color, and Demo Mode

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • ble.sh

    Bash Line Editor―a line editor written in pure Bash with syntax highlighting, auto suggestions, vim modes, etc. for Bash interactive sessions.

  • > Autocompletion is one thing zsh does better, and that alone is worth it IMO. It can autocomplete things other than filenames and even gives you a short description for each of the subcommands or CLI options in the completion candidates. For the most common commands, this works without even having to install third party completion scripts.

    The joke here is: All this requires additional scripts / configs. Whether bundled or not…

    With those scripts / config there is no difference between shells.

    > Syntax highlighting is useful as well, though that requires the use of a third party plugin. You can detect quoting errors, unmatched braces, missing commands, incorrect filepaths before hitting enter. It's indispensable in an interactive shell because that's where you write convoluted one-off one-liners.

    https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh

    > In general, zsh is extensible and offers more capabilities than bash.

    Nobody ever could show me even one feature that isn't available in almost all popular shells!

    > But to feel the difference, you need to configure it and enable the nice features.

    Yeah sure. When you tune your ̵c̵a̵r̵ shell it has nice features afterwards…

    That's true for any shell as I see it.

    ---

    I for my part don't like Unix shell. Even after 20 years of usage (as since then Linux is my only OS).

    Also I've never understood what's the case about zsh. Nobody could ever answer the question why it's anyhow "better" or even show features not available elsewhere.

    I came to the conclusion that zsh is just a stupid hype of "cool kids". It's the same as with the car tuning crowd.

    A truly better shell would be much different than a Unix shell. There are some experiments out there but nothing really convincing.

    So I continue to stay with the not so cool default. As it's most compatible and available everywhere.

    But please wake me up when there is some real innovation regarding shells!

  • zsh4humans

    A turnkey configuration for Zsh

  • OMZ is slow, been using zinit since it came out because OMZ and antigen were so slow to start up. Recently I found zsh4humans [1] which benchmarks much better than any other solution, is portable, and has everything I need with sane configs.

    1. https://github.com/romkatv/zsh4humans

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  • wezterm

    A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust

  • Since author is showcasing cross-os setups,

    please mention WezTerm, WezTerm, WezTerm!!!

    The cross-os saviour terminal emulator with multiplexing and is 0.01 sec startup on windows as compared to seconds for Windows Terminal.

    Check it out !!!

    https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

  • powerlevel10k

    A Zsh theme

  • I use powerlevel10k to speed up my omz start time. Been great.

    https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k

  • autocomplete

    IDE-style autocomplete for your existing terminal & shell

  • We built the Shell Plugin Store into Fig[https://fig.io] to solve a lot of the problems mentioned in this thread. Namely:

  • oh-my-posh

    The most customisable and low-latency cross platform/shell prompt renderer

  • There was absolutely no reason to switch from Starship, but I hopped (shell-promt-hopped?) to oh-my-posh and am pleasantly happy with it.

    https://ohmyposh.dev/

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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