Zsh and Oh my zsh

General Programming
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The thread for people who’ve never really had time to look into it (like me!?)…

  • What is Zsh and what is Oh my Zsh?
  • Why should we be using it?
  • Can it be used on the server?
  • What changes?
  • Any gotchas?
  • Do you use it? Why!? Why not!?

Also see:

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Zsh is a *NIX shell, which I’ve been using for the last year to replace bash. I’m not an expert / power user but I find it has improved my development life a lot for three main reasons:

  1. Powerful globbing. Most things I need are just an ls… away. Even something as simple as ls -l project/**/[a|s]*.rb (finds all ruby files starting with a or s) is much more intuitive than the bash find or grep equivalent, Suffice to say I haven’t used the find command since I started using Zsh.

  2. Auto-completion. Not only prettier than bash, it’s also contextual. Just type kill <tab> and see what happens!

  3. Plugins. Primarily through the OhMyZsh project. I rarely have to type in more than three characters for git / ubuntu / rails commands any more. Oh, and there are some cool themes too!

There are lots of other great things about Zsh like powerful scripting, inline editor, and more but since I haven’t really been using these I won’'t comment.

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I’ve been an OhMyZsh user for several years now. The globbing, autocompletion and the plugins are really great. I’ve actually never become a zsh power user because OhMyZsh makes it dead easy…

Only problem is ssh-ing into bash boxes sad panda

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I use it since it can be extended (plugins and themes)
I generally like stuff which is more extensible :smile:

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