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Switching Shells on macOS Catalina

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Switching Shells on macOS Catalina
Photo by Christina Victoria Craft on Unsplash

I have been using Zsh for years now, but many people on Mac OS used the Bash shell as the default shell for Terminal. Then Mac OS Catalina came along and overturned everything. It switched the default shell to Zsh.

The reason why some people still have Bash set as their default shell in Catalina is because Zsh is only set to the default shell on newly created user accounts, so people who have been using Mac OS pre Catalina, still have their default shell set to Bash.

If you are a long time Mac OS user prior to Mac OS Catalina, and you haven't done anything to the shell configuration, then your default shell is still Bash. But Catalina is pointing to Zsh. So how can you switch to Zsh? It's pretty simple really. And you can do it two ways. The first would be via the Terminal and the second would be via Users & Groups.

Switching from Bash To Zsh from Terminal is as simple as executing the following in Terminal:

chsh -s /bin/zsh

For those of you who may be new to the Command Line on Mac OS, you can find it by going into your Spotlight Search (the magnifying glass icon in top right corner of your computer screen to the right of your username) and type the word "Terminal". When the Terminal icon appears, just click on it, and it will launch. To launch Spotlight Search itself, press the command key and then the space bar.

When you type this command in Terminal and then hit the enter/return key, you will have to enter your system password. Then close out of the Terminal window, and re-open it. You will now be on Zsh.

To check what shell you are using, type the following command in Terminal and hit return:

echo $SHELL

In my case, it prints out the following in Terminal:

/bin/zsh

That means I am using Zsh.

If you have just executed chsh -s /bin/zsh in Terminal, then executing echo $SHELL is a great idea to make sure you have been successfully switched over to Zsh.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to switch back to Bash as my default shell to see what happens, now that I am on Catalina. When I executed chsh -s /bin/bash, I got the following afterwards in the Terminal window:

Switching Shells from Bash to Zsh

It's not the best idea to stay with Bash. The version of Bash that is installed with Mac OS/Catalina has remained at 3.2 since 2007. Make sure to switch over to Zsh. Of course I immediately switched back to Zsh with the command chsh -s /bin/zsh, made sure to exit out of that instance of Terminal afterwards, and then re-open it. When I executed echo $SHELL, /bin/zsh was printed out to Terminal.

If you are not a Command Line person, you could always go into System Preferences and then the Users and Groups icon. However, it is a longer and more tedious process. I would just go with using the Command Line. I have included an article entitled What Shell Am I Using? Here’s How To Find Out that can walk you through changing your default shell via Users and Groups, if you absolutely insist on going that way.

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I will be embedding this episode of Plugging in The Holes along with a transcript in the form of a post on interglobalmedianetwork.com for your hearing and reading pleasure. I will be including the related resource links mentioned in the podcast of course. Always do. Bye for now!

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