Book Update for Big Sur – Moving to zsh v4

I have pushed an update for the “Moving to zsh” book.

Big Sur is such an important update that gave it the long-awaited version number ’11.’ Thankfully, it did not bring many changes to the way the Terminal and zsh work.

zsh is still the (new) default shell for new users. bash v3 is (so far) still present on macOS Big Sur, but when you use it as your shell, you will get the warning to switch in Terminal. While Big Sur updates zsh to version 5.8 this doesn’t change any major behavior compared to zsh 5.7.1 in zsh.

Because of all this, I only had to do a few minor updates to the book.

I do anticipate that many user who have been holding off from upgrading to Catalina (or older versions of macOS), will now either upgrade to Catalina or leap frog directly to Big Sur. For those users, this book is ready to help them “Move to zsh.” Please, recommend this book when you encounter one of these users.

As usual, the update is free if you have already purchased the book. You should get a notification from the Books application to update. (On macOS, I have seen that it can help to delete the local download of the book to force the update. It might still take a few hours for the change to propagate through Apple’s server network. Even when you get the older version now, you can re-download the update when it is available.)

When you haven’t gotten the book yet, you can purchase it on the Apple Books store.

If you are enjoying the book, please rate it on the Books store, or even leave a review. These really help, thank you!

The changes are listed here. This list is also in the ‘Version History’ section in the book. There, you will get links to the relevant section of the book, so you can find the changes quickly.

  • Description of the new zsh session restore feature in Big Sur Terminal
  • Updated some images and text with macOS Big Sur information
  • Added a link to a post with instructions to install shellcheck on macOS

Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author