starwalker / zsh-quickstart-kit

Simple zsh quickstart for using zsh and zgen

ZSH Quickstart Kit

Table of Contents generated with DocToc

• Installation
  • Prerequisites
    • Fonts
    • OS X
    • Linux
  • Set up Zgen and the starter kit
  • Customizations
    • Functions and Aliases
    • zgen plugin list
• Other Resources
  • ZSH
  • Dotfiles in general
  • Vim

Installation

Prerequisites

Fonts

This quickstart includes a prompt theme that requires a powerline-compatible font in your terminal. Fonts that are powerline-compatible include glyphs used to display the nice branch icon that the theme in this .zshrc uses, among other useful glyphs. Here are a few good powerline fonts I've found:

• Awesome Terminal Fonts - A family of fonts that includes some nice monospaced Icons.
• Fantasque Awesome Font - A nice monospaced font, patched with Font-Awesome, Octoicons and Powerline-Glyphs.
• Hack - Another Powerline-compatible font designed specifically for source code and terminal usage.
• Input Mono - A family of fonts designed specifically for code. It offers both monospaced and proportional fonts and includes powerline glyphs.
• Monoid - Monoid is customizable and optimized for coding with bitmap-like sharpness at 15px line-height even on low res displays.
• Nerd fonts - A collection of over 20 patched fonts (over 1,700 variations) & fontforge font patcher python script for powerline, devicons, and vim-devicons: includes Droid Sans, Meslo, AnonymousPro, ProFont, Inconsolta, and many more.
• Powerline patched font collection - A collection of a dozen or so fonts patched to include powerline gylphs.

OS X

1. Download iTerm2 from http://www.iterm2.com. It is considerably nicer than the stock Terminal application that comes with OS X. Seriously, never use Terminal again.
2. Install the current version of Homebrew from http://brew.sh/.
3. Install GNU Stow with brew install stow
4. Homebrew has a newer version of zsh than the one Apple ships, so brew install zsh to install it.
5. Switch your shell to zsh
   1. System Preferences -> Users & Groups.
   2. Unlock the preferences
   3. Select your user
   4. Select advanced options
   5. Set your login shell to /bin/zsh (or /usr/local/bin/zsh if you decided to use the newer version packaged by brew)
6. Install some powerline compatible fonts from one of the links in the Fonts section above.
   1. Clone the powerline-fonts repository, or download Input Mono.
   2. Copy the fonts into ~/Library/Fonts.
   3. In iTerm 2, go to Preferences->Profile in your iTerm 2 preferences, then select one of the powerline compatible fonts you just installed.
   4. Make sure you also specify a powerline compatible font for non-ASCII in your iTerm 2 preferences or the prompt separators and branch glyphs will show up garbled.

Linux

1. Switch your shell to zsh with chsh -s /bin/zsh
2. Install GNU Stow - yum install -y stow on Red Hat / CentOS systems

I don't use a GUI on Linux, so you'll have to track down how to install new fonts, then install one of the powerline fonts and specify it for your terminal application. If you get garbled branch glyphs, make sure there isn't a separate font setting for non-ASCII characters that you need to also set to your powerline font.

Set up Zgen and the starter kit

Now that your fonts and default shell have been set up, install zgen and the dotfiles from this starter kit repository.

1. Install Zgen
   1. cd ~
   2. git clone [e-mail]:tarjoilija/zgen.git
2. Install the starter kit
   1. cd ~
   2. git clone [e-mail]:unixorn/zsh-quickstart-kit.git
3. Configure zsh by symlinking the .zshrc, .zsh_aliases and .zsh-completions from this repo into your ~.
   1. You can do this with stow by:
      1. cd zsh-quickstart-kit
      2. stow --target=/Users/YourUsername zsh. Replace /Users/YourUsername with /home/YourUsername if you're on Linux.

The .zshrc, .zsh_aliases & .zsh_functions files included in this kit enable:

• Automatic periodic updates to zgen and your plugins
• Cross-session shared history
• Deduping your command history
• Many more tab completions, courtesy of the zsh-users/zsh-completions repository, and periodic updating to tip of master of that repository.
• Proper command history search
• Syntax highlighting at the command line
• Tab completion of Rakefile targets
• Using oh-my-zsh compatible plugins and themes (via the zgen framework)
• Various helper functions for interacting with OS X's clipboard, audio volume, Spotlight and Quicklook.

Customizations

Functions and Aliases

The .zshrc included in this kit will automatically source any files it finds in ~/.zshrc.d. This is to make it easy for you to add extra functions and aliases without having to maintain a separate fork of this repository. The files will be sourced in alphanumeric order, I suggest a naming scheme of 001-onething, 002-something-else etc to ensure they're loaded in the order you expect.

zgen plugin list

I've included what I think is a good starter set of zsh plugins in this repository. To make the list easier to customize without having to maintain a separate fork of this kit, if you create a file named ~/.zgen-local-plugins, the .zshrc from this starter kit will source that instead of running the load-starter-plugin-list function defined in ~/.zgen-setup. Note: using ~/.zgen-local-plugins is not additive, it will completely replace the kit-provided list.

Included plugins:

• RobSis/zsh-completion-generator - Adds tool to generate zsh completion functions for programs missing them
• chrissicool/zsh-256color - sets your terminal to 256 colors if available
• djui/alias-tips - Warns you when you have an alias for the command you just typed, and tells you what it is
• peterhurford/git-it-on.zsh - Opens your current repo on github, in your current branch
• rimraf/k - k is a directory lister that also shows git status on files & directories
• sharat87/pip-app - A set of shell functions to make it easy to install small apps and utilities distributed with pip
• skx/sysadmin-util - A collection of scripts useful for sysadmins
• srijanshetty/docker-zsh - Docker completions
• stackexchange/blackbox - Tom Limoncelli's tool for storing secret information in a repository with gnupg encryption, automatically decrypting as needed
• unixorn/autoupdate-zgen - Adds autoupdate (for both zgen itself, and your plugins) to zgen
• unixorn/git-extra-commands - Collected extra git helper scripts
• unixorn/jpb.zshplugin - Some of my standard aliases & functions
• unixorn/rake-completion.zshplugin - Reads your Rakefile to tab complete the Rakefile targets
• zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search - Better history search
• zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting - Syntax highlighting as you type
• zsh-users/zsh-completions - Tab completions for many more applications than come standard with zsh

We also have zgen load oh-my-zsh and these plugins:

• oh-my-zsh
  • aws
  • brew
  • chruby
  • colored-man
  • git
  • github
  • osx
  • pip
  • python
  • rsync
  • screen
  • sudo
  • vagrant

Other Resources

ZSH

For a list of other ZSH plugins and themes you can use, check out my awesome-zsh-plugins list.

Dotfiles in general

dotfiles.github.io/ has a lot of great resources for dotfiles - frameworks for managing them, configurations for editors and bootstraps with initial configurations to start from.

Vim

If you're using vim, spf13 is an excellent starter configuration and plugin collection.