Switching to zsh on Mac, 6 years late

For six years, I’ve seen this every time I open a new terminal:

The default interactive shell is now zsh.
To update your account to use zsh, please run `chsh -s /bin/zsh`.
For more details, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050.

I finally changed it last week. I started writing this earlier, but children, family, vacations and homemade pizza got in the way — giving a strong contribution to my happiness.

I was never a fan of zsh for two reasons:

1. The way it treats wildcards. bash is smart enough to determine when input should be passed to the command instead of being interpreted as wildcards for the files in the current directory.

For example:

grep Salary.*named *

This behaves very differently in bash and zsh. zsh will respond with:

zsh: no matches found: Salary.*named

assuming there are no matching file names.

bash will go ahead and run grep the way I intended.

2. Licensing (perhaps — not sure about this point). I have the impression that several organisations are switching to zsh mainly because of bash’s licensing change. With version 4, bash switched to GPLv3, which is less favourable for a proprietary company like Apple. There are several reasons to criticise GPLv3, and even Linus Torvalds recognises that the GPLv3 is less free than GPLv2 as it imposes new restrictions. And logically, with more restrictions come less freedom. I usually tend to agree with Linus Torvalds more than with Richard Stallman (whom I met when he gave a talk at my university — maybe I should talk about that one day). And to be fair, Apple did contribute to both bash and ksh in the spirit mentioned by Torvalds in the same talk “I give you source code, you give me changes back, we’re even”.

However, it doesn’t seem fair that after serving reliably for decades, bash is sidelined not for technological reasons but for licensing politics, should that really be the case here.

So, despite the wildcard matching (the licensing thing is more of a rant and has no actual impact on my daily life) why am I switching to zsh after six years? One could still install an updated version of the Bourne Again Shell with brew

Because of muscle memory. I have already been using zsh for probably more than a decade at work, and it just feels natural to have the same setup on both my work and personal laptops so that I don’t need to remember the little differences between the two.

Thank you bash, you have served me well. From 1999 to 2027.

Note to self should I decide to use bash again.

To use the version distributed with brew just:

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash

And remember that spaceship works with both.