Comments on: My zsh adventure http://rc3.org/2009/04/04/my-zsh-adventure/ Strong opinions weakly held Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:46:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Jacob Davies http://rc3.org/2009/04/04/my-zsh-adventure/comment-page-1/#comment-5171 Jacob Davies Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:58:29 +0000 http://rc3.org/?p=9369#comment-5171 <p>Sounds pretty cool, but I spend so little time at the command line these days that I can't see I'd use it enough myself to switch. For good or ill, I live in Eclipse 95% of the time.</p> <p>However, the bit about not living in a rational, scientific world is very true. That's why I always admired Perl, for admitting that the world is not a perfectly symmetrical problem that can be attacked by any Turing-complete language with exactly the same usefulness. If that were true we'd still be programming assembler.</p> <p>Perl, and from the sounds of it zsh, admit that there is complexity and unevenness in the world. Making tab-completion work exactly the same way for all commands is very consistent, but it's not as helpful as making it work differently for different commands and avoiding doing things that you almost never mean to do. I think we'd be better off if more programmers thought about things this way rather than thinking that all problems must be solved in the most general way possible even at the expense of usability.</p> Sounds pretty cool, but I spend so little time at the command line these days that I can’t see I’d use it enough myself to switch. For good or ill, I live in Eclipse 95% of the time.

However, the bit about not living in a rational, scientific world is very true. That’s why I always admired Perl, for admitting that the world is not a perfectly symmetrical problem that can be attacked by any Turing-complete language with exactly the same usefulness. If that were true we’d still be programming assembler.

Perl, and from the sounds of it zsh, admit that there is complexity and unevenness in the world. Making tab-completion work exactly the same way for all commands is very consistent, but it’s not as helpful as making it work differently for different commands and avoiding doing things that you almost never mean to do. I think we’d be better off if more programmers thought about things this way rather than thinking that all problems must be solved in the most general way possible even at the expense of usability.

]]> By: Hoàng Đức Hiếu http://rc3.org/2009/04/04/my-zsh-adventure/comment-page-1/#comment-5150 Hoàng Đức Hiếu Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:28:09 +0000 http://rc3.org/?p=9369#comment-5150 <p>the link "dotfile.org" has a stray " at the end.</p> <p>@Sean: what do you mean by "changing systems"?</p> the link “dotfile.org” has a stray ” at the end.

@Sean: what do you mean by “changing systems”?

]]> By: Matt http://rc3.org/2009/04/04/my-zsh-adventure/comment-page-1/#comment-5146 Matt Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:59:02 +0000 http://rc3.org/?p=9369#comment-5146 <p>While exploring zsh (and giving some love to my other long-neglected dotfiles), I'm trying to only add things one at a time, so I can actually understand what they're all doing. It makes it a lot more more rewarding as a learning experience. That said, we'll see how long it takes for me to start pasting junk in wholesale.</p> While exploring zsh (and giving some love to my other long-neglected dotfiles), I’m trying to only add things one at a time, so I can actually understand what they’re all doing. It makes it a lot more more rewarding as a learning experience. That said, we’ll see how long it takes for me to start pasting junk in wholesale.

]]> By: Sean http://rc3.org/2009/04/04/my-zsh-adventure/comment-page-1/#comment-5142 Sean Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:08:00 +0000 http://rc3.org/?p=9369#comment-5142 <p>While I know that bash_completion is only a shadow of zsh, it does provide the advantage of not having to change systems.</p> While I know that bash_completion is only a shadow of zsh, it does provide the advantage of not having to change systems.

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