Should interactive comments be defaulted to on for ZSH?

[Molski]

Since zsh is the default for a standard Manjaro (Gnome) user, this seems like a configuration flaw. But maybe this is only me.

Since the dawn of time (or the horrid user experience of the commercial *NIXs), I have used hash/# to comment out commands. This is handy to type out a command, then press ^A/# to comment the whole command out, hit enter and come back to it.

I’ve never known Bourne, Bash, or any other shell to act any other way. I only learned about the INTERACTIVE_COMMENTS option after Manjaro. I see OSX users that also use zsh with the same option disabled.

Of course I can easily change this for myself. But let’s not be like Apple! We need our hash!

[cscs]

Ouch … if I read you right the default is that

echo stuff # comment

is not understood as a comment, and instead you get something like

zsh: bad pattern: #

?

By default, the zsh shell enables the interactive_comments shell option in scripts (non-interactive shells in general), but not when running an interactive session.

As its only the interactive shell … I guess it falls under users choice.

Also worth noting is that its used by zsh normally as a ‘histchar’

[Molski]

@cscs

zsh: bad pattern: #

Yeah.

It’s only new installs that I notice it, but I will never forget get one time I typed a long command with lots of piping and redirection, and it did not act like a comment for the whole line.

[Molski]

@cscs

As its only the interactive shell … I guess it falls under users choice.

Whoops, this was edited in after my reply. Yes, in the topic title I say that it’s default am wondering about. I do change it. It’s just every new install, I think to myself… Why?

Commenting out commands in the interactive shell has been the only way I’ve used any shell. I’m curious why is it defaulted off, unlike everything else?

I usually remember to set that option, but there was that one time…

Edit: I also missed:

Also worth noting is that its used by zsh normally as a ‘histchar’

Well that’s unfortunate… Why would they use the comment character?

[cscs]

Dunno, according to the guide it be like this:

There’s also a parameter, $histchars. The first character is the main history expansion character, normally !`' of course; the second is for rapid substitutions (normally ^' --- use of this is described below); the third is the character introducing comments, normally ``#'. Changing the third character is definitely not recommended. There’s little real reason to change any.

So its still used for comments … just introducing them yourself while using history?

Its also related to this other option

EXTENDED_GLOB

Patterns, to match the name of files and other things, can be very sophisticated in zsh, but to get the most out of them you need to use this option, as otherwise certain features are not enabled, so that people used to simpler patterns (maybe just *`', ?' and ``[...]‘) are not confused by strange happenings. I’ll say much more about zsh’s pattern features, but this is to remind you that you need this option if you’re doing anything clever with ~`', #', ``^’ or globbing flags — and also to remind you that those characters can have strange effects if you have the option set.

Of course you can always jump back over to bash if thats more comfortable … its what I do.

sudo pacman -Syu bash bash-completion

[Molski]

My reply got lost a few days ago, in that incident.

I just wanted to understand the reasoning of the default configuration of zsh. In the first reply, you edited in:

@cscs

Also worth noting is that its used by zsh normally as a ‘histchar’

So that one word made sense on the reasoning, histchar was the part I was missing.

echo $histchars                                                                                                           127 ✘
!^#

There’s a few ways of changing this. (Of course going back to Bash would!) I was just using the setopt interactivecomments option. I just couldn’t understand why this wasn’t the default, like it is in Bash. Everything else I’ve liked about zsh, but I was confused on why they would repurpose that character here.

Since even in ksh over 3 decades ago, I could just set -o vi, then type out drafts of long commands, then use the hash to comment, and come back them. Every other shell I’ve used has worked this way, and that ^A/# two key combo, I use all too much without even thinking. I thought this was a common thing people did, but as I said, maybe it’s just me.