A Developer’s Guide to Lightweight Zsh Configuration

Enhance your productivity with this minimalist Zsh configuration

Photo by Lukas on Unsplash

Z shell (Zsh) is an enhanced Linux terminal that is easy to configure and a joy to work with.

There’s nothing wrong with Bash. But you'll never look back once you try out a modern shell such as Fish or Zsh. No wonder Zsh is the default on macOS.

Here’s how to elevate your command-line experience with Zsh and Zim.

If you don't have Zsh on your system, you can install it using your package manager. On Debian-based distros, that’ll be.

sudo apt install zsh

You can verify the installation using

zsh --version

To set Zsh as your default terminal, run

chsh -s $(which zsh)

Note: You must log out and then log in again to apply the changes.

Quickly install Zim, a lightweight Zsh configuration framework, using the following command.

Zim is lighter and modular therefore a bit flexible in comparison to frameworks such as Oh My Zsh.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zimfw/install/master/install.zsh | zsh