Switching to Zsh in macOS Catalina not working

Question

I decided to take the plunge and switch to zsh. So, I followed the Terminal window instructions and entered:

chsh -s /bin/zsh

I then entered echo $0to see the switch - and it returned -bash!

Then, I went to the support page, and followed the instructions there to make the change through System Preferences. However, the "Login shell" dropdown already showed zsh:

So, I thought maybe I need to reboot... Nope, the System Preferences still show zsh, Terminal returns -bash, and when I try to re-run chsh -s /bin/zsh, Terminal returns chsh: no changes made.

Running echo $SHELL in Terminal returns /bin/zsh.

What am I missing???

Solution

Okay - one more place to check:

In Terminal's Preferences, under the General pane, there's an option to use the default login shell or set another. For some reason, mine is set to use another (probably set this in a far away time and place for some long done learning opportunity, lol).

Selected "Default login shell", opened a new Terminal window, and voilà, all is working as expected! Sheesh...

Found to look there in the same support article, under "How to use a different shell without changing the default".

Comments

[Giacomo1968]

Nice self-solved question!

[leanne]

Can you give more information, @user1194882? It's not clear what you mean or how this would fix the problem. Please clarify...

[leanne]

This may help in some circumstances; however, it doesn’t set the Terminal back to default settings. So, if the command path is set to something else, as mine was, this wouldn’t have helped. Again, it may help in other situations, so others may find this answer helpful!