Since the story link is just to the project github page, here's a blog post from the person who did the performance optimization talking a little more about what he did:

http://blog.patshead.com/2011/04/improve-your-oh-my-zsh-star...

Here's the exact pull request for that commit, with quite a bit of discussion about why it's faster and why it was done the "wrong" way before:

https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/pull/269

Hope that helps anyone else who was curious about exactly what was changed!

What does ZSH offer me that I don't already have with Bash? And really, what's the most convincing part? Not just "cool" stuff?

I'll admit upfront that bash may well be able to do the following, but what sold me on ZSH is that by installing ZSH and then oh-my-zsh, I had a shell that was doing things that no shell has ever done for me before:

* Fuzzy completion of paths: I now find myself typing things like: scr/mus_ser<tab> and having that expand to script/musicbrainz_server.pl. It feels very natural!

* Interactive tab completion: I now usually queue music with: nyxmms2 add /media/music/<tab><tab><tab> and I can now select an artist using my arrow keys from all the tab completions. This of course works anywhere that you can use completion (ie, filename completion).

* Corrective typing: If I make a mistake typing something, ZSH notices and asks me if I want to correct this: "mv moneyz.csv ~/backups" might say "Did you mean moneys.csv" (assuming moneyz.csv doesn't exist).

* Completion seems to work in so many more places. For example, I can use tab completion with scp and ssh and it completes paths on the remote machine. This is seriously useful.

Like I said, you might very well be able to do all this with bash and other shells. But I don't have to worry about setting it up, because it's all just done for me now.

Switch to zsh today in honor of the royal wedding! ;-)

Care to point me to a good "Why you should use zsh, instead of bash" guide / page?

I would recommend just taking a leap of faith and trying it out for a few days (with oh-my-zsh, of course). If you're used to bash, you'll probably find zsh very comfortable to use.

It's super easy to install if you're on a Mac and have homebrew installed (just do `brew install zsh`), and oh-my-zsh has an uninstall command that will switch you back to bash if you don't like it.

Just decided to install zsh and use this. My favorite thing so far is how the titles of my screens changes automatically based on the directory I'm in or the server I'm ssh'd into.

That should be happening in Bash too...

It really is way faster now. I had uninstalled it a few weeks back because command+T would take around a second to be all ready, but now I reinstalled it and I love it.

too bad there's no oh-my-zsh selfupdate

There is a secret undocumented update command:

  cd ~/.oh-my-zsh; git pull origin master

d'oh, could have thought of it. thanks

there is a documented one: upgrade_oh_my_zsh

tbere's a broken auto-updater that'll be fixed asap!