I’ve always been a bash user but I’ve recently decided to give zsh a while. It has some pretty useful features such as path expansion and replacement (see this slideshare). And yes, I’m well aware of bash-completion thank you very much.
It also has a nice eco system of expansions including oh-my-zsh with which I’m using plugins for git, composer (php), laravel5, brew, bower, vagrant, node and npm. I went with the agnoster theme and for iTerm2 (my terminal application of choice) I installed the Solarized Dark and Light themes. Both work well with the agnoster theme. I also installed and use the Meslo font.
One issue I did find immediately is things like file type colourisation with ls were not as good as bash. To resolve this, I installed the warhol plugin (as well as brew install zsh-syntax-highlighting grc). Now I find my ls’, ping’s, traceroute’s etc all nicely coloured.
We use Dropbox with work and to keep my work and home office laptops in sync, I moved the configs into Dropbox and symlinked to them:
cd ~ mv .oh-my-zsh Dropbox/ mv .zshrc Dropbox ln -s Dropbox/.og-my-zsh ln -s Dropbox/.zshrc
This all works really well. My bash aliases are fully compatible so I just pull them in at the end of .zshrc (source ~/.bash_aliases). Lastly – to prevent the prompt including my username and hostname on my local laptop, I set the following in .zshrc:
export DEFAULT_USER=barryo
So far, so happy.