OSDev.org

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...

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

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.

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.