Linux - Zsh

Table of Contents

Introduction

As is well-known, shell is an interface provided by the Unix/Linux operation systems (OS) to subscribers whereby a user can interact with the kernel of the OS efficiently and conveniently.

In fact, there are already a variety of shells, e.g., bash, csh, tcsh, zsh, etc. This post just presented a brief introduction to zsh.

Zsh is indeed a powerful shell. Perhaps this is just the reason why it is termed "shell terminator", as letter 'Z' is the letter terminator, the last one in the alphabeta.

Installation

For Archlinux, zsh can be easily installed by the following command. 

pacman -S zsh

Configuration

Mandatory

After the installation, zsh can be made as the default shell by 

chsh -s /bin/zsh

Before that, all the shells available can be listed by 

chsh -l

Then, you can add your own configuration in ~/.zshrc.

Optional

Even though zsh is usable out of the box, future configuration is necessary since the customization can really improve our experiences.

Regarding the customization, there exists a toolkit already, e.g., oh-my-zsh, which can be considered as a baseline for the further configuration.

Here is an example ~/.zshrc. 

# Lines configured by zsh-newuser-install
setopt notify
unsetopt beep
bindkey -e
# End of lines configured by zsh-newuser-install

[[ $TERM=="xterm" ]] && export TERM=xterm-256color

# If you come from bash you might have to change your $PATH.
# export PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH

# Path to your oh-my-zsh installation.
export ZSH=/usr/share/oh-my-zsh

# Set name of the theme to load. Optionally, if you set this to "random"
# it'll load a random theme each time that oh-my-zsh is loaded.
# See https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/wiki/Themes
ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"

# Uncomment the following line to use case-sensitive completion.
# CASE_SENSITIVE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to use hyphen-insensitive completion. Case
# sensitive completion must be off. _ and - will be interchangeable.
# HYPHEN_INSENSITIVE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to disable bi-weekly auto-update checks.
DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to change how often to auto-update (in days).
# export UPDATE_ZSH_DAYS=13

# Uncomment the following line to disable colors in ls.
# DISABLE_LS_COLORS="true"

# Uncomment the following line to disable auto-setting terminal title.
# DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE="true"

# Uncomment the following line to enable command auto-correction.
# ENABLE_CORRECTION="true"

# Uncomment the following line to display red dots whilst waiting for completion.
# COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS="true"

# Uncomment the following line if you want to disable marking untracked files
# under VCS as dirty. This makes repository status check for large repositories
# much, much faster.
# DISABLE_UNTRACKED_FILES_DIRTY="true"

# Uncomment the following line if you want to change the command execution time
# stamp shown in the history command output.
# The optional three formats: "mm/dd/yyyy"|"dd.mm.yyyy"|"yyyy-mm-dd"
# HIST_STAMPS="mm/dd/yyyy"

# Would you like to use another custom folder than $ZSH/custom?
# ZSH_CUSTOM=/path/to/new-custom-folder

# Which plugins would you like to load? (plugins can be found in ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/*)
# Custom plugins may be added to ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
# Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup.
plugins=(git)


# User configuration

# export MANPATH="/usr/local/man:$MANPATH"

# You may need to manually set your language environment
# export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

# Preferred editor for local and remote sessions
# if [[ -n $SSH_CONNECTION ]]; then
#   export EDITOR='vim'
# else
#   export EDITOR='mvim'
# fi
export EDITOR='emacs -nw'

# Compilation flags
# export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

# ssh
# export SSH_KEY_PATH="~/.ssh/rsa_id"

# Set personal aliases, overriding those provided by oh-my-zsh libs,
# plugins, and themes. Aliases can be placed here, though oh-my-zsh
# users are encouraged to define aliases within the ZSH_CUSTOM folder.
# For a full list of active aliases, run `alias`.
#
# Example aliases
# alias zshconfig="mate ~/.zshrc"
# alias ohmyzsh="mate ~/.oh-my-zsh"
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias e='/usr/bin/emacs -nw'
alias sudo='sudo '

ZSH_CACHE_DIR=$HOME/.oh-my-zsh-cache
if [[ ! -d $ZSH_CACHE_DIR ]]; then
    mkdir $ZSH_CACHE_DIR
fi

source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh