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Zsh: The Ultimate Shell for Power Users

Zsh: The Ultimate Shell for Power Users

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Umair Maratab
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3 min read

Table of contents

Zsh, short for Z Shell, is an advanced shell and command-line interpreter for Unix-like operating systems. It is an extended version of the Bourne shell (sh) with additional features and improvements.

It is popular for its features like Auto-completion, Plugin, and Theme Support and is easily customizable.

Setting Zsh on Ubuntu Machine

1. Check your current shell:

echo $SHELL

Output:

2. Update your system.

sudo apt update

3. Install zsh.

sudo apt install -y zsh

4. Change the current shell to zsh.

 chsh -s /bin/zsh

5. Now logout of your device and log back in again so you can see your shell changed.

6. Execute: gnome-session-quit to log out or just log out via GUI.

7. Log back in, open the terminal and you will see.

8. Press 0:

9. Install oh my zsh now.

Make sure you have git installed and then execute:

sh -c "$(wget -O- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

10. After installing oh my zsh you will see output like this:

11. Now we have installed oh my zsh and we can install and add plugins to zsh.

12. We will add plugins into our .zshrc file which looks like this:

You can open it on any text editor, like gedit ~/.zshrc or nano ~/.zshrc we will edit this file later.

13. Now let's add auto-suggestion plugin into our zsh.

You can follow this to install and add auto-suggestion plugin:

https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions/blob/master/INSTALL.md#oh-my-zsh

OR

  • Execute this:

      git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

    and add this zsh-autosuggestions to your .zshrc file in the plugin variable.

    • To do that open .zshrc using:

        sudo open ~/.zshrc

      on line 73 (line number can be different for you) add zsh-autosuggestions .

14. Save this file and then close the terminal.

Open the terminal again and when you type a command you will see auto-suggestions like this:

15. Now we will add another plugin which is syntax highlighting.

  • You can go to this URL to setup it.
    https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting/blob/master/INSTALL.md#oh-my-zsh

    OR

  • Execute this:

      git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

    and after that like auto-suggestions plugin add this one to .zshrc as well.

    •                       sudo open ~/.zshrc

      Add zsh-syntax-highlighting in the plugin section.

    • After adding it your plugin section should look like this:

16. Save your .zshrc file.

17. Close Terminal.

18. Open it again and now you will see syntax highlighting + auto-suggestion on.

  • See this:

You can make this more amazing but adding a theme like powerlevel10k.
--> I will write about it as well and will add its link to this article.

  • If you have any problem following this, please feel free to ask anything.
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