'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.
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)
I also prefer using a “classic” shell (bash), also mostly for the fact that it’s the same on every platform. I also just haven’t found a use case for any other shell yet.
I go the other way; I actually write a lot of fairly small, simple scripts and make them convenient to use by also defining and using small aliases - mostly one and two letter aliases; only a few as long as 3-4 letters; that make them quick and convenient for my personal use.
