I have know about zsh for a long time now but have never really had a compelling reason to switch my default shell from bash until just recently, I have been hearing more and more people talking about how powerful and awesome zsh is. So I thought I might as well take the dive and get started since that’s what all the cool kids seem to be doing these days. At first I thought that changing my shell was going to be a PITA with all the customizations and idiosyncrasies that I have grown accustomed to using bash but I didn’t find that to be the case at all when switching to zsh.
First and foremost, I used a tool called oh-my-zsh to help with the transition. If you haven’t heard about it yet, oh-my-zsh aims to be a sort of framework for zsh. This project is a nice clean way to get started with zsh because it give you a nice set of defaults out of the the box without having to do much configuration or tweaking and I found that many of my little tricks and shortcuts were already baked in to to oh-my-zsh, along with a ton of other settings and customizations that I did not have using bash.
From their github page:
oh-my-zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and few things that make you shout…
Here are just a few of the improvement that zsh/oh-my-zsh offer:
- Improved tab completion
- persistent history across all shells
- Easy to use plugin system
- Easy to use theme system
- Autocorrect
The most obvious difference that I have noticed is the improved, out of the box tab completion, which I think should be enough on its own to convince you! On top of that, most of my tricks and customizations were already turned on with oh-my-zsh. Another nice touch is that themes and plugins come along as part of the package, which is really nice for easing the transition.
So after spending an afternoon with zsh I am convinced that it is the way to go (at least for my own workfolw). Of course there are always caveats and hiccups along the way as I’ve learned there are with pretty much everything.
Tuning up tmux
Out of the box, my tmux config uses the default shell, which happens to be bash. So I needed to modify my ~/.tmux.conf to reflect the switch over the zsh. It is a pretty straight forward change but is something that you will need to make note of kif you use tmux and are transitioning in to using zsh.
set-option -g default-shell /usr/bin/zsh
I am using Ubuntu 14.04, so my zsh is installed to /usr/bin/zsh. The other thing that you will need to do is make sure you kill any stale tmux processes after updating to zsh. I found one running in the background that was blocking me from using the new coonfig.
Goodies
There is a nice command cheat sheet for zsh. Take some time to learn these shortcuts and aliases, they are great time savers and are very usefull.
oh-my-zsh comes bundled up with a large number of goodies. At the time of this writing there were 135 plugins as well as a variety of themes. You can check the plugins wiki page for descriptions for the various plugins. To turn on a specific plugin you will need to add it to your ~/.zshrc config file. Find the following line in your config.
plugins=(git) and add plugins separated by spaces plugins (git vagrant chef)
You will need to reload the config for the changes to be picked up.
source ~/.zshrc
Most themes are hosted on the wiki, but there is also a web site dedicated to displaying the various themes, which is really cool. It does a much better job of showing differences between various themes. You can check it out here. Themes function in a similar way to plugins. If you want to change your theme, edit your ~/.zshrc file and select the desired them.
ZSH_THEME="clean"
You will need to reload your config for this option as well.
source ~/.zshrc
Conclusion
If you haven’t already made the switch to zsh I recommend that you at least experiment and play around with it before you make any final decisions. You may be set in your ways and happy with bash or any other shell that you are used to but for me, all the awesomeness changed my opinion and decide to reevaluate my biases. If you’re worried about making the switchin, using oh-my-zsh makes the transition so painless there is practically no reason not to try it out.
This post is really just the tip of the iceberg for the capabilities of this shell, I just wanted to expose readers to all of its glory. Zsh offers so much more power and customization than I have covered in this post and is an amazing productivity tool with little learning overhead.
Let me know if you have any awesome zsh tips or tweaks that folks should know about.
