Lightning talk done for American Express Publishing Online team on September 16, 2011. When I started working at AEXP, I was the only one who used zsh while everyone else used bash. The presentation was about why zsh is "the shit."

1. zshvs bash

2. What is zsh? Zsh is a UNIX command interpreter (shell) Extended bash; most resembles the Korn shell (ksh); its compatibility with the 1988 Korn shell has been gradually increasing. enhancements include: command-line editor options for customizing its behavior filename globbing features to make C-shell (csh) users feel more at home extra features drawn from tcsh (another `custom' shell) Most bash configs are compatible

3. Why zsh?

4. Awesome tab completion Expand paths ve/pl/re => vendor/plugins/redmine Expand remote paths Expand variables $PATH<tab> => /Users/rober1/.rvm/bin:/usr/local/pgsql/bin:/Users/rober1/bin Approximate /pbulic/html => /public/html

5. Other features Sharing of command history among all running shells Extended file globbing allows file specification without needing to run an external program such as find Improved variable/array handling Editing of multi-line commands in a single buffer Spelling correction Various compatibility modes, e.g. zsh can pretend to be a Bourne shell when run as /bin/sh Themeable prompts, including the ability to put prompt information on the right side of the screen and have it auto-hide when typing a long command Loadable modules, providing among other things: full TCP and Unix domain socket controls, an FTP client, and extended math functions Fully customizable

6. Getting started with zsh A lot of people included their dotfiles on GitHub Oh my zsh! By default, zsh has a lot of options already active