Customize Zsh Pt.4 - ZSH-z Plugin

Yes, Oh My Zsh is awesome! That’s the first thing I installed when I switched from Bash to Zsh and I used it for a few years.

Past that time, I realized that in my daily use, the only features I was taking advantage was:

• Autocompletion and history-based autocompletion using the arrow keys.

• The fancy multi-line and colorful user prompt showing the working directory, and the switching color after the fail/success of the previous command execution.

• The git repository info at the user prompt.

• The z command, provided by the ZSH-z plugin.

I couldn’t help myself but thinking that the Oh My Zsh framework was much more than I needed. I decided to remove Oh My Zsh and reset Zsh from scratch, so I could configure and install only the features I needed.

This is a four-part post series explaining how to set up those features on a fresh new Zsh installation:

Customize Zsh Pt.1 - Autocompletion

Customize Zsh Pt.2 - User Prompt

Customize Zsh Pt.3 - Git Info

Customize Zsh Pt.4 - ZSH-z Plugin 👈

ZSH-z Plugin

This is a very handy tool:

ZSH-z is a command line tool that allows you to jump quickly to directories that you have visited frequently in the past, or recently…[read more]

You may know that you could be using Zsh plugins managers and frameworks to install/enable plugins but, let’s stick to the simple way we already applied.

How to Set Up

• Create a user custom Zsh plugins directory, and a directory for the ZSH-z plugin:

  mkdir -p ~/.zsh/plugins/zsh-z

• Download the script and save it to the plugins directory created:

  From Zsh:

  curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agkozak/zsh-z/master/zsh-z.plugin.zsh -o ~/.zsh/plugins/zsh-z/zsh-z.plugin.sh
  

  From the browser:

  https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z/blob/master/zsh-z.plugin.zsh

  (Remember to save into ~/.zsh/plugins/zsh-z directory)

• Load it in Zsh and enable some configurations by adding the following code into the .zshrc file at the # PLUGINS section created in the last post:

  # PLUGINS
  
  source ~/.zsh/plugins/git/git-prompt.sh
  source ~/.zsh/plugins/zsh-z/zsh-z.plugin.sh
  
  # git prompt options
  # ...
  
  # zsh-z plugin options
  ZSH_CASE=smart # lower case patterns are treated as case insensitive
  zstyle ':completion:*' menu select # improve completion menu style
  

• Source the .zshrc file again, in the Zsh shell type:

  source ~/.zshrc
  

It’s ready, give z command a try!

The gif demo belongs to the project’s GitHub repository: https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z

This is the end of the Customize Zsh post series and you unlocked powerful Zsh features!

Keep going, try yourself to enable more tools/features, and let me know on Twitter or via email.

Useful links & references:

• Zsh Documentation (man -k zsh to list each Zsh man page section)
• agkozak/zsh-z

Footnotes:

• Follow me on Twitter to get more posts like this and other quick tips in your feed.
• If you have any doubts or tips about this article, I’d appreciate knowing and discussing it via email.
• Do you have any other Cli tips? Would you like to publish that in this blog? Please send an email to cli drops.
• As English is not my native language, I apologize for the errors. Corrections are welcome.
• Contact: cli [@] alldrops [.] info.