Returning to Bash

My shell history is… dizzying. Like many I started with Zsh. It was the default on MacOS and I followed multiple tutorials trying to find ways to customize it. Eventually this made it mind numbingly slow. I couldn’t take it, so I tried out Fish instead. Fish was much faster, but the scripting was very different and hard to adapt to. Nevertheless I stuck with Fish because of the speed. Then I discovered Nushell, and boy was it attractive. It turns all data into tables, making it a pretty slick tool for scripting. Nushell is written in Rust so it also was very speedy.

I liked Nushell fine, but as I started doing more work on servers and other Linux machines, I started realizing how much of a pain it was to install and use. Yes it’s fast, but that’s not always the case over SSH or lower powered hardware. After a while I started just tweaking bash on these other machines, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the simplicity. Not only that, it was the default for most distros, and it took up hardly any ram. If you have been following my blog then you know that I’m a sucker for low memory and digital minimalism.

So tonight I migrated everything into a single bash file and it is glorious. Nothing beats this feeling (well not true but still feels great).