Favorite shell

[tetsujin]

Rather than just "what is your favorite shell?" I'd be very interested in why a particular shell is your favorite...

I mean, I'd probably vote Bash - but that's just because it's what I use. It's what I use because it's what I've always used. But there's all kinds of things about it I'm not too thrilled with - the lack of anything in the way of useful datatypes tops the list. I'm also not too keen on the syntax (if/elif/fi, the use of square brackets, etc.). I like the overall concept (shared in most CLI shells) of encouraging sets of small tools that can interoperate - but I feel that without a decent set of agreed-upon datatypes backing it up, most shell problems seem to degrade into repeated parse/process/serialize steps, with "parse and serialize" taking altogether too much of the process - and so people program their scripts in Perl or something instead...

Based on my current feelings about what a shell should be, MS Powershell is probably the closest thing to what I want in a shell - though I'm not too keen on their decisions about style (the whole verb-noun thing, for instance - it's nice and consistent but way too verbose...) I'm trying to design my own shell, but getting hung up on matters of syntax and what capabilities it should have...

[Brynet-Inc]

It saddens me that nobody else voted for the Korn shell.

[bewing]

I grew up having a choice to use either Bourne or C shell. As said above re: BASH -- the Bourne conditional format sux. And, just in general, Bourne shell was stupider than the C shell. So I always used and preferred the C shell.

Since BASH is just a rewrite of Bourne, screw BASH. I'll take any rewrite of the C shell over BASH. Also, 95% of the time, the convenience of a GUI is preferable to any CLI. Almost always, what I need to do every day can be done with a doubleclick, or a drag-and-drop. So it comes down to the fact that I prefer to have a minimizable C shell window on a GUI desktop, for when I need to do anything complex.

[Solar]

It was similar for me back on the Amiga - GUI, with only a few things done on the CLI. Today, I spend whole days without ever leaving the bash / konsole window.

But that's not (mainly) an achievement of the shell, but a severe shortcoming of the GUI interfaces. (Yes, I mean that.) Funny enough, Windows users have a remedy for that - DirectoryOpus, which I used in version 5.82 back on the Amiga, is now available for Windows. But on Linux, nothing comparable exists.