8 best alternatives to sh as of 2018 - Slant

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zsh

Top Pro

Interactive autocompletion

When you start typing a command, you can press the tab key and it will complete the command you started typing. If there are multiple potential commands, you can choose which one to run by simply pressing tab again. Case-insensitive by default, too. See More

Top Con

Defaults are unfriendly for a long-time bash user

Expect to find a configuration you like (or use the configuration utility) to set reasonable preferences. Default zsh interaction is different enough to make you stutter through what used to be familiar workflows. See More

Top Pro

Powerful community-driven tools via oh-my-zsh

Oh-my-zsh is a community-driven framework, which helps users with their zsh configuration and plugins. 400 plugins, 200+ themes and auto-updates to always be up to date. See More

Top Con

Requires a lot of configuration to be used fully

Zsh requires a lot of tinkering with configuration files and downloading plugins in order to be able to do tasks which other shells may be able to do out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Autocomplete for options

Zsh intelligently determines if you are trying to complete a file path or an option, and pressing tab after typing - will reliably bring up a list of options. See More

Top Con

Not fully compatible with bash

There is a small chance you may have a bash script that doesn't work in zsh, although this is very very rare and most developers will never run into any issues. See More

Top Pro

Good bash compatibility

Things you've learned using bash will largely apply to zsh. Scripts written in bash will run with little to no modification. See More

Top Pro

Shared histories

If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, most likely you will have several terminal windows open. Zsh has great support for command line histories. The history is unique and shared through all the different instances. See More

Top Pro

Smart escaping

Zsh can determine the context of the command you're typing in and determine if it should escape characters if you're typing in a URI. See More

Top Pro

Recursive globbing

ls **/*.log for example is supported by ZSH. See More

Top Pro

Pipe output to a temporary file:

Some programs don't support loading from stdin, but ZSH can store outputs to a temporary file, example: unzip =(curl http://example.com/someZipFile.zip) See More

Top Pro

Great install procedure

Zsh will take you through a procedure which is roughly 30 minutes in length before during install. Through this procedure it asks you to set different options and customize the shell the way you want it to. Most of these settings are also found in other shells, but to customize them you have to go dig configuration files while zsh allows you to do it in the beginning. See More

Top Pro

Faster spelling correction

Zsh' s correct (or correctall) is vastly superior to Bash's attempt at spelling correction. See More

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177 15

fish

Top Pro

Already set up for you

While other shells require a lot of set up to act the way you want them to and to have some useful features, fish works perfectly out of the box. It has all the most widely used features baked in and are there out of the box without having the need to install plugins or tweak any configuration files. See More

Top Con

Not POSIX compliant

Although fish tries not to break POSIX compatibility without a good reason, and despite efforts to implement a compatibility mechanism, you can face some issues if POSIX compatibility is expected/required. Though, enthusiasts fix these cases. For example, add set shell=sh in your .vimrc to solve the issue for vim. See More

Top Pro

Auto suggestions

fish suggests commands as you type, based on command history, completions, and valid file paths. As you type commands, you will see a completion offered after the cursor, in a muted gray color (which can be changed with the fish_color_autosuggestion variable). See More

Top Con

Very slow

Much of the functionality in Fish was not written with performance in mind. See More

Top Pro

High portability

Because it needs very little configuration to work properly, you can use Fish everywhere. If you are working on a system you don't usually work, installing Fish from the repository is easy and will give you the same experience as the installation on your own machine without having to drag a dotfile around. See More

Top Con

No support for sudo ! !

Fish has no support for sudo !!, but you can use Oh My Fish shell framework and install bang-bang plugin to have this shortcut in Fish shell. The downside of using bang-bang is that it takes over ones default key bindings, for those that don't use them it should not be an issue but for those that do it is an annoyance to be considered. This can also be achieved by making this custom function: function sudo if test "$argv" = !! eval command sudo $history[1] else command sudo $argv end end See More

Top Pro

Universal variables

You can define Universal variables, which are shared instantaneously through all running fish sessions and persists through shell restarts. See More

Top Con

No undo support

There is no included undo feature currently. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

It has a great tutorial. And the official documentation is clear, full of eloquent examples, and to the point. See More

Top Pro

Fisherman ⚑ A fast, modern plugin manager for fish

Large test coverage, micro-second shell start, compatibility with plugins from other existing frameworks such as Tackle, Oh My Fish and Wahoo, cache system, offline index, the Fishery and other features. See More

Top Pro

Less ambiguent lists

Here is a sample. Notice that there are 2 files with spaces in names. ls produces a valid list, and for loop correctly iterated through its values. ➤ for a in (ls); ls -l $a; end -rw-rw-r-- 1 sashka sashka 0 Apr 19 03:16 alma mater.txt -rw-rw-r-- 1 sashka sashka 0 Apr 19 03:16 whatever i want.txt sh scripts tend to be fragile when there are lists containing values with spaces. Also: ➤ echo $PATH /usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin /usr/local/bin ➤ echo $PATH[1] /usr/bin ➤ echo $PATH[-1] /usr/local/bin See More

Top Pro

Auto indentation when creating functions

When writing functions in an interactive shell, it will auto-indent as needed for if, for, function, etc. See More

Top Pro

Interactive searchable history

Fish has by far the best way to work with history, everything is automatically searchable. It works in the way you expect. No learning required. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive shell expansion in "for" loops

Unlike bash, this won't return you string *.sh if no .sh files are found for filename in *.sh echo "$filename" end See More

Top Pro

Configuration framework for fish shell

Fish community maintains Oh My Fish, which is a shell framework inspired on Oh My Zsh awesome design and name. It offer a lot of beautiful prompt themes and awesome plugins, is lightweight, awesome and very simple to use. See More

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111 11

oh-my-zsh

Top Pro

Easy to extend

It is super easy to write additional plugins or themes for. See More

Top Con

Major performance issues

It's not unusual to wait >1 second to initialize a new shell. See More

Top Pro

Great enhancements

The provided enhancements to zsh just hit the spot. See More

Top Con

Updates interrupt your flow

The update check triggers on zsh launch, so if you leave your terminal open, you need to manually check for updates, or (most annoying) when you launch your terminal, sometimes you'll need to go through the update wizard before you get to your prompt. See More

Top Pro

Easy to understand config

The configuration is very well documented and makes it easy to edit. See More

Top Con

Installing/updating custom plugins/themes is manual

Installing plugin/extension that is not in the distribution (e.g. zsh-syntax-highlighting, powerlevel9k) requires git checkout and sometime creating symbolic link with adequate name (.plugin.zsh, .zsh-theme); also you have to remember to pull these repositories from time to time to update. See More

Top Pro

Super customizable

There are a ton of plugins that come with it for many common tools and OS's. See More

Top Con

Updates over Git

Because it updates over Git, if something breaks in an update you will need to use Git-fu to revert to an older version. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Can be used by zsh on Linux, Mac or under Cygwin on Windows. See More

Top Pro

Simple installation and updates

A user doesn't have to be particularly technical to benefit from oh-my-zsh. You run a simple command to install and it asks you if it may check for git updates on a regular basis. You give up a bit of control but you get a tremendous benefit for very little individual effort. See More

Top Pro

Updates over Git

This provides a robust update mechanism with full version control. That means that no custom mechanism needs to be implemented for upgrades of the user profile. It also means that your own modifications can be preserved while still allowing upgrades. And it means that you can downgrade at any time to any previous revision if anything doesn't work right with the new version. See More

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39 6

Xonsh

Top Pro

Easy to understand, Python-like syntax

Xonsh uses a syntax which is a superset of Python 3.4 plus some additional shell primitives. Because of the similarity to Python, which is famously an easy to understand programming language, the syntax of Xonsh is pretty easy to grasp too, even more so for Python programmers. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform support

Xonsh has native cross-platform support. See More

Top Pro

Command history on steroids - including output

Xonsh has one feature that can be considered particularly unique. It stores not just the commands you type, but their output, and doing a search on your history (configurably) can search the output as well. See More

15 5

tcsh

Top Pro

C-like shell

It's a C-like shell with tenex command-completion feature, which is very convenient. See More

Top Con

Limited support online

The support and number of guides and tutorials is rather limited for tcsh online because there are not many people who use it. At least compared to some of the other more popular alternatives. See More

Top Pro

Organized documentation

All the documentation that's needed to use tcsh is located in man tcsh instead of being spread on various helper programs. See More

7 5

eltclsh

Top Pro

TclVFS

TclVFS allows you access files inside ZIP archives or on remote HTTP and FTP servers like you would local files. If you put "package require vfs::urltype; vfs::urltype::Mount http" in your ~/.eltclshrc you can do things like "file copy http://example.com/file /tmp/file" (HTTPS is currently not supported by TclVFS.) See More

Top Con

Stability

eltclsh crashes on mismatched delimiters. See More

Top Pro

A more consistent alternative to the POSIX shell

Tcl is a saner scripting language built on the same principle as the Unix shell (everything is a string) with more than a hint of Lisp. eltclsh makes it possible to use Tcl interactively with tab completion for both language constructs and file paths. The result is that you can develop a snippet of Tcl code interactively and then paste it in your script. See More

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