Showing someone zsh for the first time can be a fun experience because it’s a shell with many tricks. Usually, all it takes is a short demonstration of zsh’s tab-completion powers to captivate your audience. Being able to type gcc -[TAB] to see a list of its command line options is something that most users could never imagine, but zsh is full of surprises when it comes to making interactive shells as functional as possible.
Showing someone zsh for the first time can be a fun experience because it’s a shell with many tricks. Usually, all it takes is a short demonstration of zsh’s tab-completion powers to captivate your audience. Being able to type gcc -[TAB] to see a list of its command line options is something that most users could never imagine, but zsh is full of surprises when it comes to making interactive shells as functional as possible.
If you don’t have zsh on your system, you can download it from http://www.zsh.org/, or with your distribution’s automated installation tool.
However, despite how good zsh is, it’s not widely used. The main reason for this is that it’s rarely the default shell for Linux distributions. That distinction goes to GNU/bash, so it’s not surprising that the majority of Linux users are bash users.
The main problem with zsh is figuring out where to begin. Its man page is located at http://zsh.sunsite.dk/Doc/ and there’s a User’s Guide at http://zsh.sunsite.dk/Guide/, but they are a bit overwhelming, and it’s not entirely obvious how to enable some of zsh’s more interesting features. Fortunately, both bash and zsh implement a superset of the Bourne shell (sh), so porting your bash configuration to zsh is not too hard. With that in mind, let’s take a look at making the transition from bash to zsh 4.0.0 or later. Along the way, we’ll point out the parts of zsh that set it apart from other shells.
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