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Fedora - Set up zsh on your Fedora system - xSicKxBot - 06-05-2018

Set up zsh on your Fedora system

For some people, the terminal can be scary. But a terminal is more than just a black screen to type in. It usually runs a shell, so called because it wraps around the kernel. The shell is a text-based interface that lets you run commands on the system. It’s also sometimes called a command line interpreter or CLI. Fedora, like most Linux distributions, comes with bash as the default shell.  However, it isn’t the only shell available; several other shells can be installed. This article focuses on the Z Shell, or zsh.

Bash is a rewrite of the old Bourne shell (sh) that shipped in UNIX. Zsh is intended to be friendlier than bash, through better interaction. Some of its useful features are:
  • Programmable command line completion

  • Shared command history between running shell sessions

  • Spelling correction

  • Loadable modules

  • Interactive selection of files and folders

Zsh is available in the Fedora repositories. To install, run this command:

Code:
$ sudo dnf install zsh
Using zsh

To start using it, just type zsh and the new shell prompts you with a first run wizard. This wizard helps you configure initial features, like history behavior and auto-completion. Or you can opt to keep the rc file empty:

First-run wizard

If you type 1 the configuration wizard starts. The other options launch the shell immediately.

Note that the user prompt is % and not $ as with bash. A significant feature here is the auto-completion that allows you to move among files and directories with the Tab key, much like a menu:

Using the auto-completion feature with the cd command

Another interesting feature is spelling correction, which helps when writing filenames with mixed cases:

Auto completion performing spelling correction

Making zsh your default shell

Zsh offers a lot of plugins, like zsh-syntax-highlighting, and the famous “Oh my zsh” (check out its page here). You might want to make it the default, so it runs whenever you start a session or open a terminal. To do this, use the chsh (“change shell”) command:

Code:
$ chsh -s $(which zsh)

This command tells your system that you want to set (-s) your default shell to the correct location of the shell (which zsh).

Photo by Kate Ter Haar from Flickr (CC BY-SA).