2026-09-05 12:48 UTC
Replies (6)
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@knapjack@social.vivaldi.net 2026-09-05 13:04
@justine mksh? https://mbsd.evolvis.org/mksh.htm
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@fosdembsd@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-09-05 13:09
@justine did you try pdksd ?
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@sirwumpus@tilde.zone 2026-09-05 13:57
@justine I use mksh the MirBSD Korn Shell. There was a reason I switch years ago, but its lost to time. While bash is ksh compatible, people tend to use non-portable bash features; mksh is much smaller than bash on NetBSD.
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@purple@nya.social 2026-09-05 14:03
@justine@snac.smithies.me.uk ksh93 and derivatives are the most "bloated" of the ksh's, due to (iirc..) including extra csh compatibility that isn't useful much like bash does. oksh and mksh seem to be the winners. i couldn't divine much difference between oksh and mksh during actual use, and eventually settled on mksh because i felt it was more portable, however they've both existed in every repo that i have checked. http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm going from bash to mksh as my login shell was like when i upgraded from spinning rust to optane cache drives.
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@mason@partychickens.net 2026-09-05 17:18
@justine I used to use pdksh exclusively on both NetBSD and Solaris. I've been using Bash for a long time now, but it's got some bugs in counting escape characters in PS1 that annoy me, and I refuse to use bashisms. My .profile and .shrc work everywhere. (I used to have an .emacsrc that would figure out if it was in GNU Emacs or Xemacs and do the right thing.) The one thing Bash does better is it makes it trivial to use Emacs keys while in insert mode while running vi mode. None of the kshes let me use Emacs keystrokes in insert mode, so I have to use vi interactions exclusively. I find that in Bash I seem to intermix the two somewhat seamlessly. But as others have said in the thread, try them all. There's not a ton of difference. Maybe you'll find something you'll like. I've run ksh93, oksh, mksh, and pdksh. I don't like the old stuff (AT&T) that doesn't do tab completion, but otherwise it's all good. Even FreeBSD's Almquist sh has gotten more usable as an interactive shell.
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@pkw@snac.d34d.net 2026-09-05 20:07
oksh is the correct answer as far as i am concerned. I use it on FreeBSD because I like the default one on OpenBSD. I can't recall the exact reasons, maybe something with history (fc) was improved in OpenBSD (and oksh). OpenBSD has this thing where they will not be so beholden to history that it keeps them from improving something. (like vi and ksh). (or beholden to posix) CC: @justine@snac.smithies.me.uk