One of the surprising advantages of using a completely non-standard shell (in my case, Byron Rakitzis' Unix version of rc ) is all of the things that are not automatically set up for you by modern systems. As someone I read found out recently , 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.)