So, the question pretty much says it all. I'm on Snow Leopard, and I do a lot of web development, particularly in Rails 3 which makes heavy use of the console.
I've seen some notable bloggers etc. mention Zsh as their preference over Bash, but I don't know what difference it would make.
Could anyone give me a good comparison of what difference there is and what might make one prefer one option or the other?
This is from the Zsh FAQ:
2.5: Similarities with bash The Bourne-Again Shell, bash, is another enhanced Bourne-like shell; the most obvious difference from zsh is that it does not attempt to emulate the Korn shell. Since both shells are under active development it is probably not sensible to be too specific here. Broadly, bash has paid more attention to standards compliancy (i.e. POSIX) for longer, and has so far avoided the more abstruse interactive features (programmable completion, etc.) that zsh has.
I've used them both, but prefer Bash now days because the machines I work on default to bash consistently. The standards-compliancy comment is important to me because that means consistency between OSes.
Zsh has nice autocompletion abilities, but I kept finding cases where it didn't know what I wanted. That was several years ago, so it might have improved since then.
I've found that enabling "vi-mode" (set -o vi) in Bash makes it a much nicer command-line environment than it normally is, so I do that immediately in my .bashrc file.
When writing shell scripts I don't ever program in either bash or zsh - I program using sh (/bin/sh), because it's the lowest common denominator and the least likely to have compatibility issues. That's just an old habit that has stood me well.
locate */vi. Using zsh the result for the same command is zsh: no matches found: */vi. To make the search work in zsh, the search query has to be surrounded by quotes like locate "*/vi".
Commented
Jul 3, 2012 at 20:46