Zsh

This article on the IBM Developer site has a history of shell evolution. It isn’t anything novel, but the nice family tree diagram and comparison of scripts in different shells are illuminating. They don’t discuss zsh. The zsh FAQ outlines a brief history of that shell. In that FAQ, zsh is described as closest to the Korn shell (ksh). There are also some options to make zsh act like other shells like CSH_JUNKIE that makes it more compatible with csh.

After some deliberation, experimentation and research, I’ve decided to go with zsh as my interactive shell on FreeBSD. zsh has nice modern shell features that I’m missing when I’m at the shell prompt in sh, the default FreeBSD shell. Simple stuff like !! or !$ that I tend to use quite a bit. I’m most familiar with bash, but that seems to cut against the grain of FreeBSD. Also, zsh is the default on MacOS now so I use it quite freqently there.