Linux

Bash

Not because it's the best or even my favourite. Just because I create so many ephemeral VMs and containers that code switching isn't worth it for me.

Zsh works for me

Fish for an interactive shell, and I'll often drop back to bash for writing a script. I can never remember how to do basic program flow in fish. Bash scripting is not great, but you can always find an example to remind you of how it goes.

zsh

Definitely fish. It does everything i need out of the box. To achieve the same with zsh, i needed a dozen plugins on top of a plugin manager. Here, in satisfied with just Starship as custom prompt.

That said, i’ve been trying nushell recently. Don’t really think it’s for me, but it is pretty interesting

Bash, not because its my favourite but because it's nearly ubiquitous. I don't want to have to think about which shell I'm using.

bash is so ubiquitous that I never considered anything else.

Uh. Whatever my distro comes with per default.

Fellow Fish user here! 👋🏻

Zsh + oh-my-zsh

Soft shell tacos are my favorite. Hard shell is ok but there's nothing like a double wrapped soft taco.

Oh and I just use bash.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn't even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it's basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

zsh because I've been using it since college and I don't like change

My job is working with a ton of servers over ssh. Bash is the most convenient balance between features and not needing to do any setup.

Fish for interactive shell. “It depends” for scripting, but usually ends up Bash since it is the NixOS default.

zsh, because of highly customizable.

I know I'm a heretic but I'm a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you'll wonder why you've dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it's open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it's worth it.

Bash is fine. Zsh on Macs is fine too. I can’t stress how useful it is to learn busybox if you end up with a shell on an embedded device.

All these crazy shells people talk about are kinda like race car controls. I’m not driving a race car, I’m driving a box truck with three on the tree.

The PEPPPERONI of tools!? that's not a thing right? why pepperoni??

Bash. By default it might seem less featureful than zsh.. but bash is a lot more powerful and extensible than some give it credit for. It might be more complex to set it up the way you like it, but once you do it, that configuration can be ported over wherever bash exists (ie. almost everywhere).

Wait, I'm supposed to choose my favourite of the three shells?

Is that how they work??

Bash or ZSH. Whatever is default.

nushell is excellent for dealing with structured data. it’s also great as a scripting language.

I've explained my choice for zsh here

Nicely configured it's so convenient that I spend most of my time in the terminal and don't even use a file explorer anymore. It can also be expanded with some plugins for specific use-cases.

Former zsh user. fish works for me.
For scripts I use bash tho.

Fish, less config and super easy to set things like path, colors, and the support for dev environments and tooling is better than it was. Used to be a Zsh user, but moved since I distro hop so dang much. Less time to get going.

I use mainly fish and occasionally nushell.

Xonsh. For basic use (running CLI programs with arguments) it works like any other shell, and for other uses it has nice Python syntax (and libraries!). For example, I like not needing a separate calculator program, as I can do maths directly in the shell with an intuitive syntax.

oksh

Eshell because it is consistent cross platform and I switch often for work/etc. Sometimes I’ll use bash when I really want a native shell.

I used fish before eshell and I really like it, the auto complete is nice, but eshell has autocomplete and since aliases and other configurations are in my emacs config, they sync cross platform too.

Fish, without a doubt.

Nushell

Favorite would be a highly customized zsh.

fizsh (not fish) is what I actually end up using, as I can't be bothered to copy that config around and retune it for each machine. Gives me the syntactic sugar of zsh with common default options on by default, an OK default prompt, and doesn't break POSIX assumptions like fish. Also Installs quickly from the package manager without needing to run through the zsh setup each time - unlike oh-my-zsh. And if I still need customization, all the zsh options are still there.

POSIX shell. No, seriously. Works everywhere.

After that Python for usability.

Zsh

No plugin manager. Zsh has a builtin plugin system (autoload) and ships with most things you want (like Git integration).

My config: http://github.com/cbarrick/dotfiles

I really like nushell, which has more of a feel and ergonomics of a modern programming language without the idiosyncrasies of traditional shells (so it's obviously not POSIX shell compatible).

One major downside is that it's not yet stable, so breaking changes between releases are expected.

PowerShell, because of autocomplete and shift+arrows select.

Fish shell. I switched to fish ages ago, back when I didn't know much bash scripting. Now I am just so used to it that I don't wanna switch back. Plus it just works.

Zsh, because unlike Bash using arrays in Zsh doesn't make me want to perform percussive maintenance on the nearest Von-Neumann machine

Bash, just because everything else already uses it. That and bashisms have infected nearly all of my scripts as I clumsily bump into the limitations of POSIX string manipulation.

I have found some very fun things with sed branching patterns as a result of these limitations though...

https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Branching-and-flow-control.html

OpenBSD's default public domain kornshell fork on OpenBSD, oksh (portable OpenBSD ksh clone) on Linux/MacOS/Other Unix. It has far fewer extensions than something like Bash (which I consider a positive) while being much faster (tested with hyperfine), and the extensions it does have are all useful (arrays, coprocesses, select, .* not expanding to . or .., pattern blocks, suspending of the whole shell).

Zsh with powerlevel10k + a few plugins