MacVim vs zsh

Every plugin available for Vim is available for MacVim too.

MacVim is Vim, meaning it has all of Vim's customizability and power.

MacVim supports OSX's native shortcuts making the adoption of Vim easier.

MacVim, like Vim itself has a large community backing it.

In cases of a selected font missing certain characters, MacVim will find a font that has that character.

Vimtutor is an excellent interactive tutorial for people with no prior experience of Vim. It's bundled with Vim and takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Vim associates keys with words. For example, d is for "delete" and w is for "word". To perform an action you string together letters. Thus, to delete a word, press dw.

This way it's possible to abstract a large amount of functionality that Vim provides in an intuitive way.

Interaction with Vim is centered around several modes. Each mode has a different purpose and switching between them changes behaviour and keybindings. There are 12 modes in total (six basic modes and six variations on basic modes) and four of them are used commonly.

Insert mode is for entering text. This mode most resembles traditional text entry in most editors.

Normal mode (the default) is entered by hitting ESC and converts all keybindings to center around movement within the file, search, pane selection, etc.

Command mode is entered by hitting ":" in Normal mode and allows you to execute Vim commands and scripts similar in fashion to a shell.

Visual mode is for selecting lines, blocks, and characters of code.

Modes allow separating concerns between various tasks and reusing keys for different kinds of functionality. As a result, the workflow becomes more efficient.

Permits writing characters that don't fit in one byte, most notably logograms (for writing in languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) and Unicode characters.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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