Hello guys, I’ve been extremely busy with homework of late. Many many reports, in addition to two finals, have kept me away from not only blogging but doing all of my normal activities.

Tonight, I took my first final and turned in much of what my headache has been. I came home a bit early, and decided tonight would be my relaxation time. I decided that since I hadn’t tried something new in a while I would try out a new linux shell, having only ever used bash (Bourne Again SHell, the default on many distros). I asked in #ubuntu-offtopic if anybody had a particular shell they suggested. tonyyarusso suggested original Bourne, so I decided I should probably just google and see what comes up.

What came up most often was ZSH. I decided, what the hell, all this hype surely can’t be for nothing. I began by installing it from the Ubuntu repositories:

Very simple. Once done, I typed “zsh” and away I went. I was immediately impressed with the start up configuration wizard. It asked if I wanted a vanilla configuration or to customize my own, and being a geek I opted to configure it myself.

There were a few levels of configuration. I changed all the settings, enabling everything that sounded neat. autocd, command correction, full tab completion, everything that sounded like it would be fun to play with. Once done, I went to gentoo’s documentation page for it and read what they had to say. I played with all the settings they listed, including setting up my own custom prompt.

I started it up and was immediately greeted with a different prompt than I’m used to. If I remember correctly, it simply said:

I decided I didn’t like that, since I like to be able to see where I’m at. I read further down the page, and after initializing the prompt package, I started playing with it. I ran ‘export PS1=”[%n@%m:%~]“‘ and was greeted with my new prompt:

Much better.

Once my prompt was how I liked it, I began toying with various features. Here are my findings:

• Tab completion is far superior to bash. It’s much more like how irssi handles tab-completion, where if you begin to type something, then tab, it will complete until it finds a conflicting character and stop. If you hit tab again, it will show you a list of all possible options, and if you hit tab one more time it will begin cycling through that list of options. I find this to be better, since the whole point of tab is that I can type as little as possible.
• autocd rocks. It simply does. Type “..” and it understands that you want to go up a directory. Type “/etc” and it changes to “/etc”. This is awesome, because often I forget to type cd anyway.
• Extended globbing also rocks. Finally, I can type “du -chs ./(A|B)*” and see how much disk space all of the items in a folder that begin with A or B take up.
• Command correction is very helpful. If I type “mplzyer”, it will ask me if I meant “mplayer” and offer to always correct mplzyer to mplayer in the future
• zsh has many neat prompt styles built in, with the ability to preview them. Typing “prompt -p” gives me a large list of named prompt styles and previews of each. Here are just a couple: elite2 theme with parameters `magenta':
(dmsuperman@blitzkrieg)(129/pts/10)(09:36pm:02/23/09)-
(%:~)- command arg1 arg2 … argn

oliver theme:
dmsuperman@blitzkrieg ~ % command arg1 arg2 … argn

redhat theme:
[dmsuperman@blitzkrieg ~]$ command arg1 arg2 … argn

suse theme:
dmsuperman@blitzkrieg:~/ > command arg1 arg2 … argn

• The .zshrc file is much smaller than .bashrc. My .zshrc is under 15 lines, where my .bashrc is over 100

Shortly after playing with all of these new features, I changed my shell from bash to zsh permanently, and am now using it happily. I suggest you all at least give it a try. Here is my finished .zshrc:

Simply save this as your .zshrc and run it and you should be able to achieve what I have described above. Sorry bash, move over because zsh is the new shell for me. Until I find the next new thing to play with, at least.

I just wanted to add here, that I got tickets for Lamb of God’s upcoming tour and I am amped beyond all belief. Myself and a few friends from work (including butters) are all going to head over to the show as early as possible. It’s going to be sick. Anybody in the Columbus area that’s going, feel free to let me know, maybe you can come with us or something.