Zsh Configuration from the Ground Up

https://zanshin.net/2013/02/02/zsh-configuration-from-the-ground-up/

by pmoriarty • 9 years ago

133 23 9 years ago

zanshin.net

binarycrusader2• 9 years ago

Needs a "(2013)" tag

zaszrespawned• 9 years ago

Please tag old posts as old posts. This was written on February 02, 2013...

t0mbstone• 9 years ago

Pretty sweet collection of zsh shortcuts and tips.

Who cares if it's old, if it's still relevant?

Is there something out there now that is better than zsh?

binarycrusader2• 9 years ago

No one has yet implied that it's irrelevant because it's "old".

However, my view is that we are generally chronological beings at heart, and knowing the year that something was posted (if it wasn't the current year) is a useful to aid in determining whether we may have seen it before or whether it may be particularly relevant to our interests.

fish_fan3• 9 years ago

Fish is pretty sweet. The biggest annoyance IMHO is that you have to use env to set environment variables inline to execution.

dijit• 9 years ago

My biggest issue with fish is that it has no way of letting me kludge the last command like bash does. I have muscle memory for bash shorthands like !$ For last word of the last command I executed or !! For the whole line.

It still catches me out with its sub shells too sometimes. ( () is equiv to $() in bash )

Also. No control+R

Otherwise I think it's a beautiful shell and I keep using it.

ufo2• 9 years ago

I don't think the env thing is that big of a problem with Fish. For me, the most annoying thing is that it doesn't interoperate well with programs that output POSIX shell strings that you are expected to eval. One particularly annoying example is pkg-config.

jolmg• 9 years ago

I tried fish for a while some years ago, and left it when I noticed that its pipes were fake. Second command in a pipeline couldn't read any input until first command finished running. That made it useless for things like `strace ... | grep ...`. Trying it now, it seems they've fixed that.

I remember that I was interested in it for its multiline command formatting and history. Since then, though, I've learned that zsh also has support for multiline command history, and its vi keybindings support multiline editing for a single command. It's like every command line is a little multiline vi buffer. For this reason, I've chosen my prompt so that the command starts at the first column.

memco• 9 years ago

Been a fan of fish mostly for its typeahead autocompletion. I do miss that it doesn't have some of the Bash features others have mentioned, but it's a feature I haven't been able to replicate in other shells yet.

xiaq2• 9 years ago

Shameless plug: https://elvish.io

I cannot claim that it is better than zsh in every aspect yet, but it is getting there.

fish_fan3• 9 years ago

Super interesting! Totally worth a post in itself IMHO.

raverbashing• 9 years ago

oh-my-zsh is really good. The only thing I needed to do was set DISABLE_UNTRACKED_FILES_DIRTY="false" which is a default that really makes no sense

Also find a theme that works for you

ben174• 9 years ago

alias 'devmount=mount_smbfs //ome:ch1cag0@localhost:10139/ome /Users/$USERNAME/Projects/devvm/'

Whoooops...

zan5hin• 9 years ago

Provided access to a VM (@localhost). Not as big a whoops as you would like.

kuschku• 9 years ago

I use powerline-shell in zshell, and was also extremely annoyed by the delay.

So, I decided to rewrite https://github.com/banga/powerline-shell in go, and the performance is amazing.

The latency went down from several seconds to 200µs (except when git is used, then it’s ~4ms), and it’s fast enough.

The repo is at https://github.com/justjanne/powerline-go. Here’s a small video showing just how different the latency is: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/2017-08-21_16-43-41.mp4. Disclaimer: Although the original was MIT, I licensed my rewrite under GPLv3.

Improving the latency of software is just such an amazing quality-of-life improvement, it was well worth those 10 hours of work.

yummy• 9 years ago

grml's zsh config is so good that I never wanted to change anything in it (it's default in Arch liveusb)

Oh-my-zsh is for aliens

anderscarling• 9 years ago

I can't encourage people enough to actually set up their zsh manually instead of running a configuration framework.

I spent a few hours on this about a year back and went from over 2s to about 0.15s for a full run of an interactive login shell (`time zsh -l -i -c 'echo "test"'`). No functionality lost, at least none that I actually used and cared about.

Definitely one of the best quality of life improvements I've made to my setup in recent years.

timewarrior• 9 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I did the same. Big improvement in performance and I have a better idea of how to customize as per my preference.

I was also worried about random code getting downloaded to my machine and getting executed.

stephen123• 9 years ago

Thanks for showing us how to test that. My standard ohmyzsh takes 0.185 seconds.

  ~ time zsh -l -i -c 'echo "test"'

test zsh -l -i -c 'echo "test"' 0.09s user 0.07s system 86% cpu 0.185 total ~

Zsh Configuration from the Ground Up

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