So when watching googles coding tips on youtube they were talking about dotfiles and general setup. Going to the dotfiles they recommended and looking into it in general there a good few recommend using zsh as your shell as it has ‘cool’ features, I’m not fully sure what these features are but better tab completion seems to be one of them which sounds good to me.

Only way to find out is to try it out. I’ve used bash for forever so hopefully it’s not too different ;)

Update zsh

May as well start off with the latest version

brew install zsh

This installs zsh to /usr/local/bin/zsh so I believe some things need to change for that, it needs to be added to the list of accepted shells

Add homebrew zsh to allowed shells

sudo vi /etc/shells
# add in the line
/usr/local/bin/zsh

Change the shell

Then change the shell

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh

Configure zsh

Restart the terminal and zsh should scare you with a world of options… That is

“This is the Z Shell configuration function for new users”

I followed the config wizard changed what I thought made sense.

You can always run it again it seems

  autoload -Uz zsh-newuser-install
  zsh-newuser-install -f

Profit…

So autocompletion is cool

cd /u/l/b
# press tab
cd /usr/local/bin/
# magic!

The tab cycling of directories is pretty cool too