Ross <rli### [at] speakeasynet> wrote:
> I've never used zsh. What handy features does it have that I'm missing out
> on?

  You name it...

  I think it's quite descriptive that bash's man page is 4889 lines long
while zsh's is 20639 lines long. (It's so long, actually, that it has
been split into 16 different manpages by feature category, although you
can get the entire thing as one long manpage with 'man zshall'.)

  I must admit that I have not used bash so much as to be 100% sure that
many of the handy features I like about zsh cannot be found or turned on
(or installed as addons) in bash, but at least with the default bash
settings it seems to lack them.

  But to mention just one of the many, many handy features, zsh's
autocompletion is simply superb. It can very intelligently deduce
what you want to do from the context.
  For example, assume that in the current directory there's a bunch
of files, all of them with "-rw-r--r--" permissions except for one,
which has "-rw-------" permissions. To give it the same persmissions
as the other it's enough to write:

chmod og+r <tab>

  It will autocomplete to the only file for which the command would have
an effect. (In other words, it's not simply a dumb file completion feature.
It actually looks at what you are trying to execute, interprets it and
completes according to that. Since "chmod og+r" would be a no-op for all
the other files except one, it completes to the file for which it's not
a no-op.)
  Another of the many handy autocompletion features is that it knows the
command-line parameters of many programs. For example, you can write:

mplayer -q<tab>

and it will autocomplete that to:

mplayer -quiet

  It also completes filenames according to which program you are executing.
For example, if there are two files in the current directory, one named
"test.txt" and another named "test.avi" and you write:

mplayer t<tab>

it will autocomplete to

mplayer test.avi

  It knows that mplayer doesn't support txt files so it skips it. (Bash
does have this kind of feature too, but seems to be more limited that zsh's.
For instance, it doesn't seem to support mplayer.)

  There are many other handy autocompletion features as well.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Ross <rli### [at] speakeasynet> wrote:
>> I've never used zsh. What handy features does it have that I'm missing out
>> on?
> 
>   You name it...
> 
>   I think it's quite descriptive that bash's man page is 4889 lines long
> while zsh's is 20639 lines long. (It's so long, actually, that it has
> been split into 16 different manpages by feature category, although you
> can get the entire thing as one long manpage with 'man zshall'.)

	OK - Seems like it's worth a try. But what might break? Is there
anything that I do in BASH that may perhaps require different keystrokes?

-- 
Isn't it counterproductive to have incandescent bulbs in a fridge?


                    /\  /\               /\  /
                   /  \/  \ u e e n     /  \/  a w a z
                       >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                   anl

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Ross wrote:

>> (And there's always emacs... bahahaha!)
> 
> emacs has elisp, a viable lisp dialect. not sure where the humor is

Many people mistakenly believe emacs to be... like... a "text editor". I 
think "hosted operating system" would probably be a more accurate 
description. :-P

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Mueen Nawaz <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
>         OK - Seems like it's worth a try. But what might break? Is there
> anything that I do in BASH that may perhaps require different keystrokes?

  I don't know what you do in bash.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Thanks to anyone who cared to answer my question.

I'm currently falling in love with Ruby, and almost
finished (in Ruby) the analyse-web-offers-and-send-results-by-mail
app which I thought would be very complex (for me,
poor ever-beginner programmer) to achieve.  Instead,
it's quick and fun fun fun !

They say Ruby is designed with a "principle of least surprise"
in mind, I would also say it's "low annoyance"-compliant !

Wanna discover ?
http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Fabien.

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Fa3ien wrote:

> They say Ruby is designed with a "principle of least surprise"
> in mind, I would also say it's "low annoyance"-compliant !

I just round Ruby to be very ad-hoc and I-made-this-up-as-I-went-along. 
I prefer a language founded on a small set of basic axioms and 
everything derived from there. But hey, I'm told some folks quite like 
Ruby, so... ;-)

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Invisible wrote:
> I just round Ruby to be very ad-hoc and I-made-this-up-as-I-went-along. 

I agree with this.  It basically takes Smalltalk and reinvents it 
without any actual planning as to how things will work. I gave it up as 
soon as I realized they were changing defaults on what I'd think were 
fairly important library calls between v1.18 and v1.19, with no 
consideration for backwards compatibility and (afaict) no real good 
reason for it.

> I prefer a language founded on a small set of basic axioms and 
> everything derived from there. But hey, I'm told some folks quite like 
> Ruby, so... ;-)

I suspect it's mostly people who have worked with a very limited set of 
languages that quite like it. Sort of like living in Hawaii or San 
Diego, and then going to visit the great beaches of Europe and saying 
"Yah? So? What's the big deal with the Italian Riviera?"

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> I just round Ruby to be very ad-hoc and I-made-this-up-as-I-went-along. 
> 
> I agree with this.

So does at least one other blog I read (by a computer science lecturer 
who has a liking for Haskell).

> I gave it up as 
> soon as I realized they were changing defaults on what I'd think were 
> fairly important library calls between v1.18 and v1.19, with no 
> consideration for backwards compatibility and (afaict) no real good 
> reason for it.

Mmm, sounds like *cough* Java. :-)

>> I prefer a language founded on a small set of basic axioms and 
>> everything derived from there. But hey, I'm told some folks quite like 
>> Ruby, so... ;-)
> 
> I suspect it's mostly people who have worked with a very limited set of 
> languages that quite like it. Sort of like living in Hawaii or San 
> Diego, and then going to visit the great beaches of Europe and saying 
> "Yah? So? What's the big deal with the Italian Riviera?"

Some day I'll figure that one out... heh.

Anyway, suffice it to say that Ruby doesn't seem to fit the kind of 
programs *I* write very well.

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Invisible wrote:
> Anyway, suffice it to say that Ruby doesn't seem to fit the kind of 
> programs *I* write very well.

Oh, and the idea that the best language manual is written by someone 
other than the one who designed the language, but rather someone who 
read the source code and tried to figure out how it worked...  Bleh.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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