Sane defaults, useful aliases, no dependencies and easy to expand upon. I made it mostly to give either a sensible default rc file to extend, or just a general high quality prompt.

edit: spaces add after asterisks to avoid formatting weirdness

zsh's default is much better. Though to be fair, bash-style passglob behavior can be enabled in zsh by setting NO_NOMATCH. zsh is still zsh, after all.

There's still plenty more wildcard nuttiness. A favorite is to execute a bare *: zsh will try to execute the first file, passing the other files as arguments!

Get zsh today. Give it a spin.

1) Glob qualifiers:

  ls *(.)

  ls **/*.jpg(.L-3000000on[1,5]) **/*.png(N)

  . files
  L-3000000 with "length" (size) under 3MB
  on ordering them numerically
  [1,5] and only the first five

I have some scripts with expressions this complicated, but day-to-day it's useful for finding empty files (L0) or excluding directories. "man zshexpn" and search "Glob Qualifiers".

2) Glob operators:

  ls DSC<100-200>.JPG

  setopt extended_glob
  ls *.java~*Test*

3) Lazy for-loops (single command doesn't require do-done), and taking two variables:

  echo "A 1" > tempfile
  for i j in $(<tempfile); echo $i $j

  > x=EXAMPLE.jpg
  > echo $x:r.png ${x:r:l}.png
  EXAMPLE.png example.png

Re number 2: That works in plain old Bash too:

    ls DSC{100..200}.jpg

  > touch 1 3
  > ls <1-3>
  1 3
  > ls {1..3}
  cannot access 2: no such file or directory
  1 3

Tab completion is extremely powerful. Even serious spelling mistakes are forgiven.

The prompt is Git-aware and this provides a lot of helpful information which saves me from having to query the git cli.

There are also plugins available for completion of other programs such as rake

That's technically true for zsh in cases, but it's far easier to port or add compatibility for zsh than fish.

Today I learned people actually write / use scripts without specifying the interpreter at the top of the script. This is like writing a Ruby script and expecting it to work when calling it with the Python interpreter.