== An advantage of using a non-standard shell

One of the surprising advantages of using a completely non-standard
shell (in my case, Byron Rakitzis' [[Unix version of ~~rc~~
http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~tjg/rc/]]) is all of the things that are
*not* automatically set up for you by modern systems. As someone I read
[[found out recently http://ronebofh.livejournal.com/382822.html]],
these days this includes colourized _ls_ listings, colourized
super-intelligent _vi_, and so on.

(I might not mind colourization so much if it paid any attention to what
the baseline terminal colours were, but I haven't seen that happen yet.
And it tends to come out as fruit salad even on the best of days.)

The other thing I tend to get to skip is all sorts of _$LANG_ settings
for internationalization. These are occasionally OK, but a lot of the
time they annoy me by changing, for example, _sort_'s output or the
order _ls_ puts files in. I'm a creature of sufficient Unix habit that
I get perturbed if these shuffle. (And my scripts can get perturbed
too. Yes, I *should* work out the magic to use the old fashioned
collation and sorting order without drop-kicking the rest of the
internationalization stuff. Someday. When I have to.)

Red Hat has a well developed (and heavily used) system for sticking
standard shells with things, driven out of _/etc/profile.d_. Perusing
the files in that directory can be interesting, and sometimes alarming.
(Which leads to the discovery that the easy way to spay _ls_ is to
create an empty _$HOME/.dircolors_ file.)

Fortunately Red Hat has stopped making _/usr/bin/vi_ be _vim_; that
caused me to have a _vi_ symlink in _$HOME/bin_ that pointed to
the 'real' (non-fancy) _/bin/vi_ (I put _$HOME/bin_ before system
directories precisely so I can fix this sort of thing). These days,
the full _vim_ experience has to be invoked as _vim_, and if you ask
for _vi_ (without aliases that redirect it to _vim_) you get the plain
thing. (Unfortunately if you ask for _ex_ you're out of luck; that they
still override.)