bash-it: an alternative to oh-my-zsh

Trying out zsh

I have noticed that many people seem to be switching shells to zsh. In fact, I even tried it myself to see what the hype was all about. :)

So for a while there I was actually feeling just as good using zsh as bash. That was until I started discovering some idiosyncrasies with zsh that were different from bash. It appeared that zsh was not quite as backwards compatible with bash. Even though it seems to support the same features, it does so with similar but different syntax. This made it quite painful because every system I work on has bash installed and used by default, but not necessarily zsh. Also, many scripts out there in repositories are all coded to use bash. Now of course you can specify the shebang to make sure the scripts use bash, but why would I want to use a different shell than the scripts or systems I'm working with use themselves? I would then have to learn and maintain scripts for two different shells depending on what I'm working on.

oh-my-zsh

I'll also add that the most promising feature of switching to zsh was the awesome oh-my-zsh GitHub project that gives you a highly customizable framework. This seemed to clearly be lacking in bash and so it was this that made it quite compelling for me at first. In addition, I agree that zsh does have some nice features that work right out of the gate, but it felt like it was more to do with oh-my-zsh than zsh itself. Therefore, nothing was really compelling enough that you couldn't do with bash, albiet with some customizations.

Moving back to bash

bash-it

This is where I stumbled upon bash-it. It literally promotes itself as being a shameless ripoff of oh-my-zsh. Finally, this seemed to be the piece that was missing from bash that one was able to get with zsh quite easily. I immediately started using it and enjoyed bashing again.

bash-it has all of the benefits of a framework with support for plugins, aliases, completions, custom scripts and functions, themes, updates, search, etc. Here is a quick summary of some help options:

bash-it show aliases        # shows installed and available aliases
bash-it show completions    # shows installed and available completions
bash-it show plugins        # shows installed and available plugins
bash-it help aliases        # shows help for installed aliases
bash-it help completions    # shows help for installed completions
bash-it help plugins        # shows help for installed plugins

I even stumbled upon a few issues and feature requests myself, which I proceeded to contribute back as time allowed. I have most recently created and contributed my own font theme. It supports the following prompt features:

• time
• Python virtual environment
• user
• host
• path
• git repo
• git branch
• git dirty/not dirty
• return code status of last command

Here is a screenshot of it in action.

Check it out and let me know how you like it!