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− | There is a quick and easy way to set up a colored prompt in Zsh. Make sure that prompt is set to | + | There is a quick and easy way to set up a colored prompt in Zsh. Make sure that prompt is set to autoload in your {{ic|.zshrc}}. This can be done by adding these lines to: |
{{hc|~/.zshrc| | {{hc|~/.zshrc| |
Revision as of 13:44, 20 April 2012
Zsh is a powerful shell that operates as both an interactive shell and as a scripting language interpreter. While being compatible with Bash (not by default, only if you issue "emulate sh"), it offers many advantages such as:
- Faster
- Improved tab completion
- Improved globbing
- Improved array handling
- Fully customisable
The Zsh FAQ offers more reasons to use Zsh as your shell.
Contents
Installation
Before starting you may want to see what shell is currently being used:
$ echo $SHELL
Install the zsh package available in the official repositories.
Initial configuration
Make sure that Zsh has been installed correctly by running the following in a terminal:
$ zsh
You should now see zsh-newuser-install, which will walk you through some basic configuration. If you want to skip this, press q
.
Making Zsh your default shell
If the shell is listed in /etc/shells
you can use the chsh
command to change your default shell without root access. If you installed Zsh from the official repositories, it should already have an entry in /etc/shells
.
Change the default shell for the current user:
$ chsh -s $(which zsh)
After logging back in, you should notice Zsh's prompt, which by default looks different from Bash's. However you can verify that Zsh is the current shell by issuing:
$ echo $SHELL
~/.bashrc
to ~/.zshrc
(e.g. the prompt and the aliases) and from ~/.bash_profile
to ~/.zprofile
(e.g. the code that starts your X Window System).Configuration files
At login, Zsh sources the following files in this order:
/etc/profile
- This file is sourced by all Bourne-compatible shells upon login: it sets up an environment upon login and application-specific (
/etc/profile.d/*.sh
) settings. ~/.zshenv
- This file should contain commands to set the command search path, plus other important environment variables; it should not contain commands that produce output or assume the shell is attached to a tty.
~/.zprofile
- This file is generally used for automatic execution of user's scripts.
~/.zshrc
- This is Zsh's main configuration file.
~/.zlogin
- This file is generally used for automatic execution of user's scripts.
At logout it sources ~/.zlogout
, which is used for automatic execution of user's scripts.
- The paths used in Arch's zsh package are different from the default ones used in the man pages.
$ZDOTDIR
defaults to$HOME
~/.zshrc configuration
Although Zsh is usable out of the box, it is almost certainly not set up the way you would like to use it, but due to the sheer amount of customisation available in Zsh, configuring Zsh can be a daunting and time-consuming experience.
Included below is a sample configuration file, it provides a decent set of default options as well as giving examples of many ways that Zsh can be customised. In order to use this configuration save it as a file named .zshrc
. You can then apply the changes without needing to logout and then back in by running:
$ source ~/.zshrc
Simple .zshrc
Here is a simple .zshrc
, that should be sufficient to get you started:
~/.zshrc
autoload -U compinit promptinit compinit promptinit # This will set the default prompt to the walters theme prompt walters
Command Completion
Perhaps the most compelling feature of Zsh is its advanced autocompletion abilities. At the very least, you will want to enable autocompletion in your .zshrc
. To enable autocompletion, add the following to:
~/.zshrc
autoload -U compinit compinit
The above configuration includes ssh/scp/sftp hostnames completion but in order for this feature to work you will need to prevent ssh from hashing hosts names in ~/.ssh/known_hosts (Warning: be aware that this makes your computer vulnerable to "Island-hopping" attacks). In that intention, comment the following line or set the value to "no":
/etc/ssh/ssh_config
#HashKnownHosts yes
And move your ~/.ssh/known_hosts somewhere else so that ssh creates a new one with with un-hashed hostnames (warning: previously known hosts will thus be lost).
For autocompletion with an arrow-key driven interface, add the following to:
~/.zshrc
zstyle ':completion:*' menu select
For autocompletion of command line switches for aliases, add the following to:
~/.zshrc
setopt completealiases
Key Bindings
Zsh does not use readline, instead it uses its own and more powerful zle. It does not read /etc/inputrc
or ~/.inputrc
.
zle has an emacs mode and a vi mode. By default, it tries to guess whether you want emacs or vi keys from the $EDITOR environment variable. If it is empty, it will default to emacs. You can change this with bindkey -v or bindkey -e.
To get some special keys working:
~/.zshrc
bindkey "\e[1~" beginning-of-line # Home bindkey "\e[4~" end-of-line # End bindkey "\e[5~" beginning-of-history # PageUp bindkey "\e[6~" end-of-history # PageDown bindkey "\e[2~" quoted-insert # Ins bindkey "\e[3~" delete-char # Del bindkey "\e[5C" forward-word bindkey "\eOc" emacs-forward-word bindkey "\e[5D" backward-word bindkey "\eOd" emacs-backward-word bindkey "\e\e[C" forward-word bindkey "\e\e[D" backward-word bindkey "\e[Z" reverse-menu-complete # Shift+Tab # for rxvt bindkey "\e[7~" beginning-of-line # Home bindkey "\e[8~" end-of-line # End # for non RH/Debian xterm, can't hurt for RH/Debian xterm bindkey "\eOH" beginning-of-line bindkey "\eOF" end-of-line # for freebsd console bindkey "\e[H" beginning-of-line bindkey "\e[F" end-of-line # for guake bindkey "\eOF" end-of-line bindkey "\eOH" beginning-of-line bindkey "^[[1;5D" backward-word bindkey "^[[1;5C" forward-word bindkey "\e[3~" delete-char # Del
cat
or read
without any parameters and press them; they should then be printed in the terminal. Both can be closed again via Template:Keypress+Template:Keypress.History search
You can add these lines to your .zshrc
~/.zshrc
bindkey "^[[A" history-beginning-search-backward bindkey "^[[B" history-beginning-search-forward
Doing this, only past commands beginning with the current input would have been shown.
Prompts
There is a quick and easy way to set up a colored prompt in Zsh. Make sure that prompt is set to autoload in your .zshrc
. This can be done by adding these lines to:
~/.zshrc
autoload -U promptinit promptinit
You can now see available prompts by running the command:
$ prompt -l
To try one of the commands that is listed, use the command prompt followed by the name of the prompt you like. For example, to use the "walters" prompt, you would enter:
$ prompt walters
Customizing your prompt
In case you are dissatisfied with the prompts mentioned above(or want to expand their usefulness), zsh offers the possibility to build your own custom prompt. Zsh supports a left- and right-sided prompt additional to the single, left-sided prompt that is common to all shells. To customize it, the following variables can be used:
Prompt variables
General
- %n
- The username
- %m
- The computer's hostname(truncated to the first period)
- %M
- The computer's hostname
- %l
- The current tty
- %?
- The return code of the last-run application.
- %#
- The prompt based on user privileges (
#
for root and%
for the rest)
Times
- %T
- System time(HH:MM)
- %*
- System time(HH:MM:SS)
- %D
- System date(YY-MM-DD)
Directories
- %~
- The current working directory. If you are in you are in your
$HOME
, this will be replaced by~
. - %d
- The current working directory.
For the options mentioned above: You can prefix an integer to show only certain parts of your working path. If you entered %1d
and found yourself in /usr/bin
it would show bin
. This can also be done with negative integers:
%-1d
using the same directory as above would show /
.
Formatting
- %U [...] %u
- Begin and end underlined print
- %B [...] %b
- Begin and end bold print
- %{ [...] %}
- Begin and enter area that will not be printed. Useful for setting colors.
- In fact, this tag forces Zsh to ignore anything inside them when making indents for the prompt as well.
- As such, not to use it can have some weird effects on the margins and indentation of the prompt.
Colors
Zsh has a different approach to setting colors on the terminal than the one depicted here. First you write in your .zshrc
:
autoload -U colors && colors
Following commands would now produce the color escape sequence needed to set the requested color when the prompt is printed:
- $fg[color]
- will set the text color (red, green, blue, etc.)
- $reset_color
- will reset the text color to white
It is useful to put these color commands inside %{ [...] %}
, so the shell knows there is no output from these sequences and the cursor hasn't moved.
- Possible color values
black | red, |
green | yellow, |
blue | magenta |
cyan | white |
Example
To have a two-sided prompt you could write:
PROMPT="%{$fg[red]%}%n%{$reset_color%}@%{$fg[blue]%}%m %{$fg[yellow]%}%1~ %{$reset_color%}%#" RPROMPT="[%{$fg[yellow]%}%?%{$reset_color%}]"
It would equal(without colors):
username@host ~ % [0]
Sample .zshrc files
Here is a list of .zshrc
files. Feel free to add your own:
- Oh-my-zsh Plugin and Theme system for Zsh can help you manage your zshrc file and has a huge community of over 1400 forks on github;
- Basic setup, with dynamic prompt and window title/hardinfo => http://github.com/MrElendig/dotfiles-alice/blob/master/.zshrc;
- An Arch package named grml-zsh-config comes from http://grml.org/zsh and provides a zshrc file that includes many tweaks for your zshell.
- https://github.com/slashbeast/things/blob/master/configs/DOTzshrc - zshrc with multiple features, be sure to check out comments into it. Notable features: confirm function to ensure that user wnat to run poweroff, reboot or hibernate, support for GIT in prompt (done without vcsinfo), tab completion with menu, printing current executed command into window's title bar and more.
Global configuration
Occasionally you might want to have some settings applied globally to all zsh users. The zsh wiki tells us that there are some global configuration files, for example /etc/zshrc
. This however is slightly different on ArchLinux, since it has been compiled with flags specifically to target /etc/zsh/
instead.
So, for global configuration use /etc/zsh/zshrc
, not /etc/zshrc
. The same goes for /etc/zsh/zshenv
, /etc/zsh/zlogin
and /etc/zsh/zlogout
. Note that these files are not installed by default, so you need to create them yourself if you want to use them.
The only exception is zprofile, use /etc/profile
instead.
Autostarting applications
Zsh always executes /etc/zsh/zshenv
and $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv
so do not bloat these files.
If the shell is a login shell, commands are read from /etc/profile
and then $ZDOTDIR/.zprofile
. Then, if the shell is interactive, commands are read from /etc/zsh/zshrc
and then $ZDOTDIR/.zshrc
. Finally, if the shell is a login shell, /etc/zsh/zlogin
and $ZDOTDIR/.zlogin
are read.
Uninstallation
If you decide that Zsh is not the shell for you and you want to return to Bash, you must first change your default shell back to Bash, before removing the Zsh package.
Follow, Zsh#Making Zsh your default shell to change the default shell back to Bash, just replace zsh with bash.
Now you can safely remove the Zsh package.
If you did not follow the above, you can still change the default shell back to Bash by editing /etc/passwd
as root.
For example:
from:
username:x:1000:1000:Full Name,,,:/home/username:/bin/zsh
to:
username:x:1000:1000:Full Name,,,:/home/username:/bin/bash
External Resources
- Zsh Introduction
- Users Guide
- Zsh Docs (you can choose a different format for the doc in http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/)
- Zsh FAQ
- Zsh Wiki
- Zsh-lovers
- Bash2Zsh Reference Card
- Oh My Zshell by Robby Russell
- Gentoo zsh wiki article
- Setting up the zsh prompt
- IRC channel: #zsh at irc.freenode.org