I want a better shell (2019)
Sometimes it seems like I&#x27;m the only person that doesn&#x27;t feel like they need &quot;a better shell&quot;. This topic comes up a lot on HN.<p>Maybe if a better shell came along I&#x27;d be surprised, not knowing what I was missing. Perhaps I&#x27;m just in the dark or not imaginative enough to conceive of what one would look like.<p>With that said, whenever the discussion comes up, it seems to revolve around user specific workflow cases and &quot;do what I want you to do, not what I tell you to do&quot; design patterns, that would (from my perspective at least) feel hard to get right for everyone. As a result, we have lots of different shells now that make different trade offs and take different design approaches. That&#x27;s great, right?<p>I don&#x27;t know -- I&#x27;m rambling I suppose, I just don&#x27;t ever really feel like Bash (or fish&#x2F;zsh&#x2F;whatever) is holding me back or making my work more difficult than it needs to be. We can argue about the esotericisms of shell scripting and how it&#x27;s silly to emulate old terminal escape sequences in virtual terminals, but I feel like it misses the point.<p>I don&#x27;t know, I&#x27;m certainly willing to change my mind here, it&#x27;s just that for all of the problems I have day to day in sysadmin&#x2F;programming job functions, the shell is the least of my worries most of the time.