I’ve been on the lookout for a bash replacement for a while. After seeing a small discussion about ksh and the closed and open implementation in #illumos, my interest got reinvigorated.

After playing with both csh, ksh and zsh for a while, zsh clearly won.
I won’t bore you with the details of how this selection went, but I will share with you my .zshrc.

Most of you probably don’t know but I have a wiki for my personal documentation, some of it is public like the article on z shell.

Screenshot

There are more screenshots on the wiki article.

Features

  • Auto-update (checked at login, max 1x per day)
  • Directory change shorthand enabled
  • Extra globbing
  • Colorization support for linux, solaris and mac os x (Or as good as I could get it)
  • Per host customizations (See example for Axion, my mac with macports)
  • Keybinds that work in xterm, putty, iterm, terminal.app and sun-color
  • Auto completion
    • kill menu
    • killall menu
  • ssh host completion with auto .ssh/config setup
  • ssh user completion, stripped most comon system users to keep the list short
  • Multiple prompts (double, minimal, gentoo and gentoo-server)
    • minimal and double themes have a UTF-8 check mark/cross character (with fallback)

There is a small caveat, I use a custom font with PuTTY so check mark can still be screwed up in PuTTY.

Configuration
Please see the wiki article.

Enjoy