Here’s the Deal

zsh vs Moom

308 43

242 35

When comparing zsh vs Moom, the Slant community recommends Moom for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?” Moom is ranked 19th while zsh is ranked 53rd. The most important reason people chose Moom is:

Moom comes with many preset keyboard shortcuts. The user can go into the graphical settings of the app and change any one of them to a different combination of keys.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best power user tools for macOS?

Pros

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pro
Safer variable behaviour

Unlike Bash, zsh does not split unquoted variables by default, making it less error-prone.

Pro
Recursive globbing

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

Pro
Faster spelling correction

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

Pro
Customizable keyboard shortucts

Moom comes with many preset keyboard shortcuts. The user can go into the graphical settings of the app and change any one of them to a different combination of keys.

Pro
You can save tiling window position and size

Users can set window position and size themselves, allowing for a great way to set up a tiling window experience.

Pro
Windows can be snapped to the edges of the screen

In addition to using the grid or the overlay, Moom can move and zoom windows by dragging them to screen edges.

Pro
Simple customization

While you can set keyboard shortcuts, Moom has a very easy-to-use GUI and GUI-based customization features to help you get going right away.

Pro
Adds a zoom button for all apps

Moom adds an overlay zoom button to the corner of all apps which allows any app to go full screen or be placed to certain sections of the screen (such as the top, bottom, or sides). This works even on apps that do not normally allow for full screen views.

Pro
Multi-monitor support

Moom has excellent support for multi-monitor setups. You can drag a window to the edge of your screen into another monitor and snap it there.

Ad
Cons

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.

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.

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.

Con
UI for settings can be confusing

The settings for the app are pretty jumbled and are hard to get a grip of, especially for first time users. While all the settings one would need are there, they are difficult to find or understand, which requires a good bit of playing around with the settings in order to get a feel for them and what they offer.