This tutorial shows you the installation and some confgiurations of the zsh, which I believe is a enhanced version of bash and other small yet powerful plugins to make your cmd interface more beautiful and efficient to use. Here is a preview picture. alt text

Prerequisite

  • OS: Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)
  • Git Installed
  • Python v2.6+ except 3.2
  • pip installed

For windows users, you may refer to Bash on Ubuntu on Windows for more detailed information. Currently there is no native support for zsh on Windows. For Mac users, zsh is alrady embedded in the system, but we may add more plugins to make it even more powerful, please refer to Configure zsh

If you don’t have Git (which you should have one if you are a programmer), refer to Installing Git.

If you don’t have Python or pip, please refer to Download Python or Download pip

Install zsh

There are two ways to install zsh, one is to get the native version using

$ apt-get install zsh

Then run zsh on your terminal will do the job. When you first run it, it will let you configure .zshrc or leave it blank. To make zsh your default shell prompt, run

$ chsh -s /bin/zsh

Notice that sudo is not needed in the command. If you add sudo, then it will change the default for the root user, not current user.

The second approach is more recommanded, which uses a well-known project on Github called oh-my-zsh. To install it via this project, just run

$ sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

There are several reaons why I prefer oh-my-zsh. First it already gives you a well-defined ~/.zshrc . You can customize there for things like enabling auto-correction for commands, adding the timestamp for history command and so on. Second is that it has many beautiful themes that you can choose, the default is

ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"

you may find various screenshots here.

Enhance zsh

Well, to be honest the default zsh may not be so exciting. However, after some configurations it will be better than you can imagine.

The most exciting thing about oh-my-zsh is that it gives us a wide range of useful plugins for zsh. To install them, just add the names in .zshrc, and you may look for many other good pugins here

plugins=(git)                                                              
plugins=(... osx)

Of course, just like bash, you can add your alias to type fewer words. Like mine,

alias grep="grep --color=auto"
alias vi='vim'
alias clr='clear'
alias -s c=vi
alias -s h=vi
alias -s java=vi
alias -s py=vi
alias zshconfig="vi ~/.zshrc"
alias ohmyzsh="vi ~/.oh-my-zsh"
alias ll="ls -al"

Here alias -s c=vi let you just type in a document with the suffix .c, then it will open it in vim. Very efficient, isn’t it?

Besides, many other tools can be integrated in zsh to make it even better, and I will introduce two of them, autojump and powerline

autojump

autojump is a very powerful tool to quickly search for accessed folders. It supports fuzzy search in a great way. For example, if you have accessed a folder named abcdefghh-log-2017-1-23, and you run $ j 2017-1-23, it will directly point you to the right directory.

autojump is written in Python and can be integrated in zsh. The documentation of it can be found at autojump documentationTo intall and enable it, run

$ apt-get install autojump

and add

[[ -s ~/.autojump/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh ]] && . ~/.autojump/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh

to your .zshrc and restart the shell session to make it in effect.

powerline

powerline is a tool that enhances the interface of the shell. You can make your zsh provide more information on the terminal, like time, battery usage, even weather. To install powerline, run

$ pip install --user powerline-status

Next you MUST install the font needed for powerline, otherwise you have strage-looked symbol in your shell. you may refer to font installation or just run the command below, if you don’t want to know what they mean…

$ wget https://github.com/powerline/powerline/raw/develop/font/PowerlineSymbols.otf
$ wget https://github.com/powerline/powerline/raw/develop/font/10-powerline-symbols.conf
$ mv PowerlineSymbols.otf ~/.fonts/
$ fc-cache -vf ~/.fonts/
$ mv 10-powerline-symbols.conf ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/

Then you need to know { powerline_dir }, which can be found under location tab if you run $ pip show --user powerline-stauts, then add the these lines to .zshrc to make powerline work.

PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH
. { powerline_dir }/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh

To customize powerline, like you want to see the weather at the right end of your shell prompt, you may refer here

Wrap up

Most of the plugins and tools I mentioned above can also be embedded in other tools like bash or vim. Maybe I will write another tutorial about these things. See you soon.