> "Popularity" probably has more to do with Apple moving to Zsh than anything else. Zsh has been more powerful than Bash for literally the entirety of the existence of both. It surely was back in like 1993 when I first looked at them. The "emacs of shells" might not be the worst summary.
It's my impression that Apple switched to zsh because it's permissively licensed, so they could replace the now-ancient last version of bash to use GPLv2 (instead of v3). Obviously it helped that they could replace it with something even more feature-rich, but I expect they would have taken the exact same functionality under a more permissive license.
It's my impression that Apple switched to zsh because it's permissively licensed, so they could replace the now-ancient last version of bash to use GPLv2 (instead of v3). Obviously it helped that they could replace it with something even more feature-rich, but I expect they would have taken the exact same functionality under a more permissive license.