Zsh

I finally switched from Bash to Zsh too on my desktop machines. You can consult my configuration in my dotfiles.

Various Articles Worth Reading

• A Guide to the Zsh Completion with Examples
• How to profile your zsh startup time

Using colors in Scripts

Zsh provides a module one load that sets up some variables to use to style your terminal output. Load the module with

autoload -Uz colors && colors

This defines the following arrays:

• color and colour with a lot of associations between words and ANSI codes
• $fg, $fg_bold and $fg_no_bold for foreground color sequences
• $bg, $bg_bold and $bg_no_bold for background color sequences

Some examples:

• $color[31] has value red while $color[red] has value 31
• The $fg[red] has emits an escape sequence to change foreground color to red
• The $bg[blue] has emits an escape sequence to change background color to blue
• $reset_color does a color reset

The fg* and bg* arrays contain the following colors:

• black
• blue
• cyan
• default
• gray
• green
• grey
• magenta
• red
• white
• yellow

Based on this blog post