Zsh works for me

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.

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

Zsh + oh-my-zsh

Uh. Whatever my distro comes with per default.

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.

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.

bash is so ubiquitous that I never considered anything else.

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

Is that how they work??

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

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.

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.

Bash or ZSH. Whatever is default.

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

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

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

I really like fish because it has excellent contextual autocomplete based on the folder you're in. I haven't used any other shell that was as good at it.

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.

zsh, because of highly customizable.

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.

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.

Fellow Fish user here! 👋🏻

Fish, without a doubt.

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

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.

Powershell, but heavily customized.

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.

POSIX shell. No, seriously. Works everywhere.

After that Python for usability.

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.

I went through sh->csh->tcsh->bash

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.

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

ZSH through the excellent ZSH Quickstart Kit.

Microsoft copilot

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.

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).

I've recently migrated to nushell, I don't straight up recommend it because it's not POSIX compliant, so unless you're already familiar with some other she'll I would not use it.

That being said, it's an awesome shell if you deal with structured data constantly, and that's something I do quite often so for me it's a great tool.

Slowly trying to learn sh while using mostly bash. Convenience is nice and all, but when I encounter something like OpenWRT or Android, I don't like the feeling of speaking a foreign language. Maybe if I can get super familiar with sh, then I might explore prettier or more convenient options, but I really want to know how to deal with the most universal shell.