Z shell (Zsh) is one of the most powerful shell interpreters which is an extended version of bash, tcsh and ksh. It is a very popular command-line productivity tool for web developer’s workflow.
Some of the prominent features are:
- Better tab completion
- Easy directory navigation
- Supports lots of Themes and Plugins
- Syntax highlighting
- Auto completion
- Interactive configuration
- Color customization
In this tutorial, I will show you how to install zsh and configure ‘Oh my zsh’ framework on the Linux machine.
Install ZSH on Linux
By default, Ubuntu and Debian distros do not have zsh. To install zsh on ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 10, run:
$ sudo apt install zsh
On CentOS 8:
$ sudo yum install zsh
To verify the zsh installation:
$ which zsh /usr/bin/zsh
From the output you can see, zsh has been successfully installed in /usr/bin/zsh.
Change the current shell
First, check what shell you are currently running on by the following echo command:
$ echo $0 -bash
The above output shows the currently using shell is ‘bash’. To change the default shell, you have to run the following chsh command:
$ chsh -s $(which zsh)
Logout from the current session, now when you log in to terminal you will have Zsh shell instead of default bash.
$ echo $0 -zsh
Note: On CentOS 8 install ‘util-linux-user’ package to have chsh:
$ sudo dnf install util-linux-user
or
$ sudo yum install util-linux-user
Install ‘Oh my zsh’ Framework
Oh My Zsh is an open-source framework that runs on top of Zsh. It comes with lots of features, themes, and plugins.
Firstly, you have to install wget and git for downloading the necessary installer tools:
On Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt install git wget
On CentOS:
$ sudo dnf install wget git
Then, download the Oh My Zsh installation script, run:
$ wget https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O - | zsh
Output:
The installation folder is ‘~/.oh-my-zsh’, run ls command to list its contents:
$ ls ~/.oh-my-zsh CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md LICENSE.txt cache lib oh-my-zsh.sh templates tools CONTRIBUTING.md README.md custom log plugins themes
Next, you have to create a configuration file for the zsh shell. You can copy the configuration template from ‘~/.oh-my-zsh’ folder to your home directory:
$ cp ~/.oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc $ source .zshrc
Now on running ls command, you will notice a new look.
How to Change the theme
By default, Oh-my-zsh uses ‘robbyrussell’ theme. You can find that by opening the .zshrc file:
.zshrc
# If you come from bash you might have to change your $PATH. # export PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH # Path to your oh-my-zsh installation. export ZSH=$HOME/.oh-my-zsh # Set name of the theme to load --- if set to "random", it will # load a random theme each time oh-my-zsh is loaded, in which case, # to know which specific one was loaded, run: echo $RANDOM_THEME # See https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/Themes ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"
There are many other themes available and in ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes/ directory.
$ ls ~/.oh-my-zsh/themes
To change the default theme, edit the .zshrc file and change the default theme.
For example to change the theme to ‘kiwi’ update as shown:
Then, apply the change by running:
$ source .zshrc
How to Enable plugins
There are many plugins offered by Oh-my-zsh. You can list all of them in ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins directory.
In order to enable plugins, edit .zshrc file and add the corresponding plugins to the ‘plugins’ line.
For example:
plugins=(git docker gcloud terraform vagrant)
Configure syntax highlight on Zsh
If you want to enable the syntax highlight on Zsh shell, clone the zsh-syntax-hightlighting from github and move it to plugins folder:
$ git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git $ mv zsh-syntax-highlighting ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins
Then, insert the following line at the end of the ~/.zshrc file:
$ echo "source ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh” >> ~/.zshrc $ source ~/.zshrc
Configure autosuggestions on Zsh
While you type a command on zsh shell, it’s useful if the shell supports the autosuggestions mechanism. Fortunately, oh-my-zsh supports this feature very well.
To enable auto-suggestion install zsh-autosuggestions plugin:
$ git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions $ mv zsh-autosuggestions ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins
Then add the plugin to the list of plugins in ~/.zshrc file:
plugins=(git docker gcloud terraform vagrant zsh-autosuggestions)
Now apply the change by running:
$ source ~/.zshrc
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we learned how to install and configure ZSH on Ubuntu 20.04 and CentOS 8 machines.
Fish shell is another good alternative, worth trying for a better terminal experience. Thanks for reading and please leave your suggestion in the below comment section.
