@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.