After years of using Bash without ever really having chosen Bash, I recently switched my shell to Zsh. Why? Partly out of curiosity, and partly because I was fed up with my bash history not always being available in multiple terminals simultaneously.

Here’s how I made the switch:

  1. Installed the latest zsh and zsh-completions packages via Homebrew: 
    brew update
brew install zsh
brew install zsh-completions
  2. Installed Oh-My-Zsh
  3. Chose my preferred theme - I went with avit
  4. Added the rbenv setup code from my .bash_profile to my .zshrc file: 
    export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
  5. Added aliases, ENV variables, and functions e.g. docker_start from my .bash_profile to my .zshrc file
  6. Copied my bash history over to my zsh history using Ankit Goyal’s fantastic import bash history to zsh history script.
  7. Set my shell to zsh in my .vimrc file: 
    set shell=/usr/local/bin/zsh
  8. Enabled any relevant plugins for my workflow e.g. git, gitfast, docker.

It’s now about two weeks since I made the switch and I’ve not looked back. Granted, zsh won’t be for everyone. But you’ve got to at least give these things a try.