I got around to switching from bash to zsh some weeks ago. One benefit of using Zsh as a shell, is that there are frameworks to help with configuration, and provide themes & plug-ins. When I’ve heard about all that before, I mostly figured that “well that sounds nice and whatever, but my command line usage isn’t that fancy”. Which is true — but also 👉 now I understand more how a framework can push me towards becoming a more advanced cli poweruser. It’s not (necessarily?!) the other way around.

~/.zshrc was automatically created when I installed ohmyzsh and it contains a whole bunch of suggestions, mostly in comments that you can uncomment to opt in. Read though them, think I’ll just leave them for now. But interesting to see what kinds of options there are. Are these all the default options, or just some examples?! Not sure.

Themes 🎨

ZSH_THEME="muse"

I got a couple of recommentations about a theme called Muse, so I’m going to try that. The default is robbyrussell and I see he’s the creator of ohmyzsh. Found this overview of themes with screenshots: ohmyzsh themes // But what do the themes actually do? 🤔 Of course. “It depends!” But looks like typically colours and symbols.

muse.zsh-theme is pretty simple with 25 sloc. While something lilke agnoster.zsh-theme has more going on with it’s 233 sloc. I see it also supports powerline/fonts which sounds fun, because I can see my favourite code font Input Mono in that list.

Aliases 📛

Discovered that ohmyzsh comes with a lot of aliases. With bash I used to add them, which is very beginner friendly in the way that you need to be intentional. But for me now, getting them automatically is helpful in discovering useful commands!

  • My all time facourite gst for git status is already there
  • .. and similar for different cd commands
  • …and to list all the aliases: alias

Plugins 🤖

There are 250+ plugins. Which is kinda overwhelming and perhaps explains some of my previous inclination to think that ohmyzsh is for other developers. But together with some recs from folks on twitter and a quick skim though, I made a list of what to check out next:

  • colored-man-pages
  • safe-paste
  • web-search
  • git
  • brew
  • forklift
  • fzf
  • z