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[LUG] zsh fail

 

One of my resolutions for 2013 was to migrate from tcsh (which I use
for interactive terminal shell sessions) and possibly also from bash
(which I use for scripting) to zsh. I gave it a good shot, but today I
deleted zsh from all my hosts.

What I had hoped to achieve: zsh promised to be technically superior
to both tcsh and and bash, having learned all the lessons of the
failings of its forebears, and also superior in ease of use
(particularly identifying sets of files on which to act) and in using
the dynamic nature of shells, building on it to match some of the
power of full-featured dynamic language environments such as Lisps,
Smalltalks, Python, Ruby etc: runtime extensibility, customization and
programmability, and even manual byte-compilation.

I can't say zsh failed on any of these. Where it did fail is in three
crucial areas: performance -- dreadful; initial configuration --
overly complex, opaque and disappointing; and worst of all,
documentation. With adequate documentation no doubt at least the
second and perhaps the first issue would have been fixable. As is, the
doco is worse than useless. For a start, it is visibly incomplete;
where it seems complete it is out of date; and the online resources
are surprisingly no better.

A great pity. Zsh *should* be a killer shell.

-- 
Phil Hudson                  http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit                 PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63

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