Shell Programming | Zsh

Zsh is a wonderful shell, but needs a lot of configuration.

Note that, for some softwares, configurating by myself is a really dull thing. Because they are not designed for personalized configuration. But there exist some other softwares which only show their great function after configuration, for example, vim, xterm, zsh…

Installation

Zsh is so famous that it can be found in most Linux package managers. Just easy install it using apt for Debian series or yum for Redhat series or pacman for Arch series.

After successful installation, type zsh to make sure Zsh has been correctly installed. Then I should see a simple configuration guide for creating the .zshrc file.

Then I use the command chsh to set Zsh as my default shell. One interesting thing is that when I use chsh -l to check the available shells on my computer I see two zsh directories – ‘/bin/zsh’ and ‘/usr/bin/zsh’. It’s not the problem of zsh but the problem of Linux system. Normally a new software binary file should be installed under ‘/usr/‘ directories. But just because so many are using zsh even in a terminal environment, so Linux system builds a link under ‘/bin/‘. Both are alright.

References

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Zsh