Do you prefer classic/simple or modern/interactive shells?

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'Every week DistroWatch has a poll. Some are interesting to see what people use/think about things, some are not. I think this one is a bit interesting.

Style of command line shell

In this week’s overview of command line shells we talked about several shells, from the classic bash to more modern alternatives such as fish. This week we’d like to hear whether you prefer classic, backward compatible shells such as ash, bash, and ksh, or if you prefer modern interactive shells such as zsh and fish.

Do you prefer classic/simple or modern/interactive shells?

Classic: 249 (58%)
Modern: 61 (14%)
I happily use both: 82 (19%)
Neither - I dislike both: 9 (2%)
I do not use command line shells: 31 (7%)

I voted ‘I do not use command line shells’. That’s not entirely true, now and then I do use the default Ubuntu Mate bash, but I try to use a GUI whenever possible.

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I prefer classic/interactive shells :grin:

EDIT: Okay, let me elaborate on that.
My choice is bash for the following reasons:

  1. extensively documented
  2. available on every platform, standard shell on most.
  3. a dream to use as a “higher programming language” (with warts and all)
  4. strong backwards compatibility, (i.o.w.: extremely stable)
  5. Very strong in creating prototypes by ‘claying’ code together before getting into the designing stage.

The drawback (as with every shell) is the scarcity of GUI tools.
There are only three full featured GUIs (dialogbox, gtkdialog and gtk-server) and none of them have the wide community recognition that they so much deserve.

(I deliberately left out ‘zenity’ and ‘yad’ because they just don’t cut it if you want more than a simple popup window)

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