Switching to zsh Terminal as Part of macOS Catalina Upgrade

After upgrading to macOS Catalina, I was prompted upon every new terminal window to upgrade to zsh. zsh, “z-shell” or “zish”, is the new default shell as opposed to bash.

After switching to zsh (which I did via System Preferences > Users & Groups > clicking lock and entering credentials > right-clicking User > Advanced Options > Login Shell > from dropdown menu selecting “/bin/zsh”) I ran into errors. I tried pip install <package> in a terminal window and the zsh shell returned pip command not found. Ditto when I tried conda activate <virtual environment>.

The explanation has to do with a path file. Basically, the terminal takes a command and passes it through a sequence of folders with any programs that might make sense of the command (for instance, conda requires scripts found in my /Users/<user>/anaconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh to work.

After adding this to my .zshrc file and saving it, new terminal windows recognized my favorite commands like conda and pip install. Back to normal!

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