runtah

Z Shell is probably now the best known Shell option for Unix users all over the globe. That too contributed by the fact that most people take the Terminal they get as full and final and never give a second thought about its improvement. But geeks cant resist exploring and the first option they get astounds them because Z Shell, if compared to Bash, is simple a super set of its functionality. It gives us a great Terminal which is intelligent and customizable to the point where people might ask you "Which terminal is this?".

Installation: This is fairly simple. Just a quick apt-get

sudo apt-get install zsh

Configuration: After you have installed Z Shell, the very first thing you have to do launch is type in your terminal

zsh

The first you do this, you will get some configuration manual that is navigated using numbers. The procedures are very self explanatory. It helps you configure various Options such as

• How far back in time do you want to remember commands
• If you want the shell to search history using partially entered commands (Its neat and powerful)
• Should all of your terminals be in sync while running

The whole configuration is saved into the file at /home//.zshrc.
After you have configured the shell, you can make it your default shell using the command

chsh  -s /bin/zsh

Configuration repositories: Some great configurations for Zsh have come up with full modular support and themes that will make your experience with Z a breeze. These are the most popular to repositories.

• Oh My Zsh
• Prezto

There are some others that maintain Z shell configurations around the net.
Using these pre-built configurations is very easy. Such as, configuring with Prezto. You need to type in the following after launching Z Shell. The commands will create Z Shell configurations in your home directory.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto.git "${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zprezto"
setopt EXTENDED_GLOB
for rcfile in "${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}"/.zprezto/runcoms/^README.md(.N); do
 ln -s "$rcfile" "${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.${rcfile:t}"
done

This will simple clone the repository into your home folder and then, link the configurations in place of your current configurations.