Expanding my own “Oh My ZSH!”

I’ve been thinking about cleaning up my own ZShell config and putting it out in the wild, but that just didn’t seem to happen. I was looking for something in ZShell — I think it was getting version control information at the prompt and I stumbled upon a mention of Oh My ZSH which is a bunch of powerful ZShell configs arranged in a nice way.

I tried it and I liked it. But it didn’t have everything that I used. But, heck it’s on github — easy forking.  So I did. My changes are:

• Change the xiong-chiamiov-plus theme to use vcs_info instead of being git-specific.  Gave the new theme the original name of mikeh.
• Option to configure a terminal with strange settings (labor intensive on the first run, perfectly wonderful after that.)
• Will automatically rehash the path, so new commands will be found immediately
• Added realias to quickly make a new shell alias/function (EDITOR env variable required)
• Removed upgrade checker (I don’t expect you to trust me)
• Share history with your zsh’s on the same host

More changes coming as time permits.  Enjoy!

Zsh Completion Magic

I’m a happy user of zsh for a few years now and, while I don’t know all the subtleties of it, I find it a indispensable tool. People I know and respect keep asking me “Why not bash?” One of the big reasons is zsh’s completion system.

Bash has a add-on version of this, called bash-completion, and I used that before moving over to zsh full-time. Bash-completion feels, well, added on and slow and not always working. Zsh’s completion, however, keeps surprising me on how much it does do. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

I typed "./manage.py TAB" and Zsh gave me all the arguments of a standard Django manage script.

The above screenshot came with no configuration — I didn’t have to tell zsh about Django because, well, someone already did. And I’m glad for it.

It’s not just for Django, either. See what happened when I did “./configure <TAB>” in PHP’s source tree:

The top part is what I got when I did "./configure TAB". The part below my prompt is what I got when I did "./configure –with-TAB"

So note that zsh helps me figure out the right options.  What I want to know the exact options for MySQL?

Results of ./configure –with-mTAB

Again, none of this stuff had to be configured — I just told zsh I wanted completion and it gave it to me. I didn’t have to tell it that this was a configure script — it knew that! Just like it knew about the Django script.

This is just a taste. I hope you bite into zsh for more goodness.