Here’s the Deal

zsh vs Magnet

308 43

91 30

When comparing zsh vs Magnet, the Slant community recommends Magnet for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?” Magnet is ranked 51st while zsh is ranked 53rd. The most important reason people chose Magnet is:

Easy to learn keyboard shortcuts.

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
Keyboard centric

Easy to learn keyboard shortcuts.

Pro
Intuitive handling

Just drag the window to one of the sides of the screen and it snaps there. This is especially useful for those who can't be bothered remembering the shortcuts.

Pro
Cheap

At $0.99, it is not that expensive.

Pro
Mouse controllable

Supports dragging a window along the edges of the screen to activate.

Pro
Do not have to learn or remember keyboard shortcuts

Pro
It's often on sale

For example, at the writing of this pro it's currently at $1.

Pro
Up to six external displays supported

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.