One of the core elements of a developers, operations, and security engineers system is having a powerful shell. This video is a guide on how to install, configure, and customize ZSH to make it beautiful and making your life easier when using your shell.
Video Guide
Installing ZSH
Lets get started by installing ZSH on our system.
Its very easy to install on almost every operating system as zshell is pretty much available from most package managers on Linux and MacOS:
# Debian / Ubuntu
apt install zsh
# Arch / Manjaro
pacman -S zsh
# MacOS
brew install zsh
The other tool we will be install is Oh My ZSH which is an open source framework for managing your ZSH configurations.
We can simply run a curl command to install Oh My ZSH:
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
The two main reasons for installing Oh My ZSH is the themes and plugins available to us which we’ll cover later.
Configuration and Customization
Themes
You can see a list of all the default themes built into Oh My ZSH.
~/.zshrc
# ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"
# ZSH_THEME="fino"
ZSH_THEME="agnoster"
Plugins
You can find a list of all the default plugins built into Oh My ZSH.
~/.zshrc
# https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/Plugins
plugins=(
# Tools
git
docker
kubectl
tmux
# OS
debian
macos
# Programming Languages
rust
python
# Misc
colored-man-pages
web-search
)
Tips && Tricks
Here is a bunch of tips and tricks that I think is useful to know.
Default Shell
If you want to run ZSH as your default shell on your system, you need to run the change shell command to set it for your user.
# Run Change Shell tool
chsh -s $(which zsh)
Using Dotfiles Repositpory
Check out my guide to using dotfiles
Adding Custom Aliases and Functions
Take a look at some of my bash scripts in my dotfiles GitHub repositpory.
https://github.com/GeekMasher/.dotfiles/tree/main/geek/.geek
Additional Plugins
You can also install additional plugins in ZSH that are outside of the default plugins.
Here are some of those that I think are worth bringing up:
# https://github.com/zsh-users
plugins=(
# https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
zsh-autosuggestions
# https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
zsh-syntax-highlighting
)
Neofetch
# Run neofetch if present on machine
if [ -x "$(command -v neofetch)" ]; then
neofetch
fi