Skip to content
Diego's Linux Corner

Zsh settings

Zsh is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting

Reasoning

Section titled “Reasoning”

By default we get access to the bash terminal, (bash) which has its own scripting language and login shell. But it has short-comings when it comes to speed besides other quality of life improvements zsh comes with out the box. Mainly I like the auto-completion it has, on top of its speed, and when scripting with zsh we get nice additions that I sometimes leverage.

Settings rundown

Section titled “Settings rundown”

These are settings that live (on linux) under ~/.zshrc. This file will run before zsh starts so you can extend behavior here.

# Add deno completions to search path
if [[ ":$FPATH:" != *{DENO_COMPLETIONS}* ]]; then export FPATH={DENO_FPATH}; fi


# Autostart
() {
  setopt LOCAL_OPTIONS NO_MONITOR
  fcitx5 -d &> /dev/null &
  wait
}


# Use powerline
USE_POWERLINE="true"
# Has weird character width
# Example:
#    is not a diamond
HAS_WIDECHARS="false"
# Source manjaro-zsh-configuration
if [[ -e /usr/share/zsh/manjaro-zsh-config ]]; then
  source /usr/share/zsh/manjaro-zsh-config
fi
# Use manjaro zsh prompt
if [[ -e /usr/share/zsh/manjaro-zsh-prompt ]]; then
  source /usr/share/zsh/manjaro-zsh-prompt
fi


# nvm
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion


# Load Angular CLI autocompletion.
export DOTNET_ROOT=$HOME/.dotnet


export PATH=$PATH:$DOTNET_ROOT:$DOTNET_ROOT/tools


# pnpm
export PNPM_HOME={PNPM}
case ":$PATH:" in
  *":$PNPM_HOME:"*) ;;
  *) export PATH="$PNPM_HOME:$PATH" ;;
esac
# pnpm end


# Aliases


alias waifu={WAIFU}
alias lasf="ls -laF"
alias prx={PRX}
alias lesgow={LESGOW}
alias jpmu={JPMU}
alias jpmuU={JPMUU}


# Shell function aliases
raku() {
  {RAKU}
}


# bun completions
[ -s {BUN} ] && source {BUN}


# bun
export BUN_INSTALL="$HOME/.bun"
export PATH="$BUN_INSTALL/bin:$PATH"


# Alacritty
fpath+=${ZDOTDIR:-~}/.zsh_functions


# Cool start
fastfetch


# Go Path


export GOPATH="$HOME/go"


# Deno Path
export PATH="$GOPATH/bin:$PATH"
{DENO}


# Add RVM to PATH for scripting. Make sure this is the last PATH variable change.
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.rvm/bin"
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

The rundown is as follows:

  • There’s some deno completions so that the terminal picks them up
  • This is part of the japanese keyboard setup, in short we set up fcitx5 to run as a demon so that we can access the respective keyboard emulator the moment the system boots up. (otherwise we would have to manually initialite it always)
  • Pretty sure so that we don’t see weird symbols there’s this the whole chunk of code with powerline, HAS_WIDECHARS and other manjaro-zsh stuff. (Some of it might also be auto-generated).
  • NVM configurations that are also auto-added when installing nvm
  • A section that allows to add the dotnet space to the machine’s path
  • Another auto-generated section probably, this points to the local directory for pnpm
  • Aliases for things I want such as:
    • There’s a program to scale images (don’t ask why I need this), this opens it up with one command
    • An alias to list files in a directory well formatted (it will pick-up hidden files as well)
    • An alias to jump into a projects folder
    • An alias to jump into a GO Lang working folder
    • An alias to run a go program that is a menu to open up games (personal unreleased project)
    • An alias to build, copy the executable to a specific directory and run the menu to open up games
    • This ties into the custom scripts maintenance file, with this alias I can run the update sh script
    • Bun auto-generated completions
    • So that alacritty has access to cool zsh auto-completions we add them to its path
    • I like to see the system health when opening a new terminal session so fastfetch is run here
    • Setting up a go path for working with it
    • Auto-generated deno path export
    • RVM export, (I use ruby solely for an asciidoc tool nothing else)

A variable file

Section titled “A variable file”

Already explained in the README.md of the respective repository, but in short, a .vars file should have inside respective values to then parse onto the respective .zshrc file when passing this onto a new machine. For security reasons the values are obscured.

Custom scripts

Section titled “Custom scripts”

For now there’s one utility script that I use which is maintenance.sh. This takes care of just vacumming logs, clearing caches and the like, but by sending a --upgrade flag it will actually run a full yay -Syu command on top of running a script for pnpm to auto-update. You can read it in its repository, it’s a bit long, so it won’t be explained here that much in detail. (Besides, it’s well commented).

Wrapper scripts

Section titled “Wrapper scripts”

A good way to bubble up aliases to sudo, is to instead of writing an alias under ~/.zshrc you can create a wrapper script at a specific location, e.g.,

sudo nano /usr/local/bin/hx


#!/bin/sh
exec helix "$@"


sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/hx

This is a specific use case for helix, since I had installed it but it would only open up with helix ..., where as the titular hx is shorter. And so I simply created this file, and even when editing files that require sudo, sudo hx file and hx file all work just fine.

Status Bar

Section titled “Status Bar”

By default Manjaro’s comes with pk10, and you can use its CLI tool to auto-generate a dotfile that fits to your liking and customizes the terminal’s status bar look and feel. Guide.

My personal preference:

Status Bar Image

  • The path
  • Git branch name
  • The time at the right end

That’s it.