Choosing your shell

One of the biggest productivity enhancements we can make to our Ubuntu installation is changing the default shell. Ubuntu comes with the Bash shell by default, which is speedy and perfectly usable. We can increase our productivity, however, by choosing either the Z shell (ZSH) or fish shell. Both of these shells provide better out-of-the-box experiences than Bash.

ZSH is one of the most popular shells on Linux, and is the default shell on macOS since Catalina. It has 30 years of history, is highly configurable, and has a strong community with a large set of community-created themes and customizations. We first learned about ZSH in Chapter 5, Changing your Windows Terminal appearance, where we used the oh-my-zsh project to modernize our terminal's look. That just barely scratched the surface of the configurability and flexibility of ZSH; we'll learn more about it in the following sections.

Also worth mentioning is the fish shell; this shell has grown...