Zsh knows three different types of aliases:

This is the regular alias, acting just like the one of bash:

alias less=/usr/share/vim/vim64/macros/less.sh

call without parameters to display defined aliases:

alias

Global aliases act just like the ones described before, but with one exception: they don't have to be given at the beginning of the line. So e.g.:

alias -g G='|grep'

can be used like this:

dmesg G eth

and will be expanded to the following:

dmesg |grep eth

This is quite crazy stuff: when entering just an existing filename as “command”, zsh can expand it as an alias by checking for the suffix of the filename. A simple example says more than a thousand words, so here it is:

alias -s pdf=xpdf

basically makes all files ending with “pdf” being opened using xpdf. Reminds me of the “double-click everything” behaviour of a certain operating system, but is better at the same time. So e.g. specifying the following on the commandline:

• .pdf

will expand to:

xpdf *.pdf

this is because alias expansion is being applied before globbing.

Create them using the builtin bindkey:

bindkey ^A "beginning-of-line"

to view all defined bindkeys, just call without arguments just like with alias:

bindkey

zsh assists you in finding the right name for a given key combination through ^V:

^V<key combination>

Although the syntax is quite identical to the one bash uses, the expansion may not be specified at the beginning of the line.

I created a file defining variables for the relevant colours:

fg_green=$'%{\e[0;32m%}'
fg_blue=$'%{\e[0;34m%}'
fg_cyan=$'%{\e[0;36m%}'
fg_red=$'%{\e[0;31m%}'
fg_brown=$'%{\e[0;33m%}'
fg_purple=$'%{\e[0;35m%}'

fg_light_gray=$'%{\e[0;37m%}'
fg_dark_gray=$'%{\e[1;30m%}'
fg_light_blue=$'%{\e[1;34m%}'
fg_light_green=$'%{\e[1;32m%}'
fg_light_cyan=$'%{\e[1;36m%}'
fg_light_red=$'%{\e[1;31m%}'
fg_light_purple=$'%{\e[1;35m%}'
fg_no_colour=$'%{\e[0m%}'

fg_white=$'%{\e[1;37m%}'
fg_black=$'%{\e[0;30m%}'

and use the builtin source to include the file just before defining the prompt (or using colour escapes in general).

First things first.

There is builtin support for right-aligned prompts in zsh. So one can have a prompt consisting of a left and a right part:

PROMPT="${fg_light_blue}%d %# ${fg_no_colour}"
RPROMPT=" ${fg_light_green}%n@%M${fg_no_colour}"

Which will look like this: <br> Zsh.jpg

Addressing inside strings is just like with Python:

a="ich hab nix gemacht.";a[1]='I';a[-1]='. (Bart Simpson)'

Take the following example:

typeset -A ass_array; ass_array=(one 1 two 2 three 3 four 4)

Then

print $ass_array[one]

returns the first element's value, 1.

print ${(k)ass_array}

returns the keys,

print ${(v)ass_array}

the values.

The builtin zcompile can be used to precompile zsh source files for faster loading.

cd /usr/share/zsh/<version>/funtions
for i in **/*(.) ; do
	zcompile $i
done
cd /usr/share/zsh/site/functions
for i in *; do
	zcompile $i
done

• http://zsh.dotsrc.org/Doc/Release/zsh.html
• http://aperiodic.net/phil/prompt/
• http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-18503.html
• http://unfug.org/data/foils/2005/PimpMyX86.txt
• http://www.michael-prokop.at/computer/tools_zsh_liebhaber.html
• https://dustri.org/b/my-zsh-configuration.html