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Zsh killer features
At last I realized that zsh shell is really much more useful and better to use than either tcsh or far much than bash. Many shells provide different very cool features, that looks like a killing feature, but in most cases, for me, all of them are in seldom use. tcsh has plenty history substitution options, as bash has large quantity of parameter expansion techniques. But I hardly use even a small piece of them. Of course they can greatly reduce overall character input count, but are too bloated to remember.
One of the most often mentioned zsh‘s feature is it’s commands completion. It is convenient possibility to use fancy menus to either select process you are going to kill, or git’s subcommand to execute. Or maybe just to choose corresponding directory or filename. Well, sometimes, in my opinion, this can be pretty useful, but character count during those menus exploration in most cases, visual analyzing of all those entries leads to too high interaction (human with computer) delay and I will enter two more characters of filename and complete it with Tab faster. Entering filename’s part and hitting Tab is one context, but looking for necessary entry is uncomparable another one. Context switching is an expensive operation.
Moreover all those completions can be very relaxating: you will forget your files hierarchy, forget what options does command have, forget what targets exist in your Makefile, forget how to easily automate PID saving and killing by it, forget how to either make cool shell aliases or write yet another extra useful small Perl-script. Of course there is no distinct border of those unskilled relaxation: if there is file “foo” and “bar”, then obviously there is no need to force hacker typing it’s fullname. Remote SSH directories transparent observation and completion is another undoubtedly useful feature. But all of those completions exist in other shells except zsh.
Anyway there are some killer features that made me zsh hard fan and currently no word about switching back to either tcsh or bash. Here they are:
- multiline editing capabilities are extremely useful without creating many temporary one-time separate shell-scripts. And of course you can easily edit them inside external text editor.
**/*-like various path expansion that saved me from huge quantity of find occurrences and together with*(.)-like things your will forget about it in most cases at all. I had several aliases and external shell-scripts, all calling find, but now throw them out.- command spellchecking — tcsh already had this feature, but bash did not. With high speed typing, error rate is pretty high too and this feature can save much time and nerves.
- autopushd possibility — each cd to directory acts like pushd and you can easily travel back like in your browser. This feature is particularly useful together with Z plugin.
- autocd option is also presented in bash. It is under a big questions of usefulness, as ambiguity may appear too often with it. With this option you can suppress cd before directory name and shell automatically understands that you are going to change it.
- filename extension related aliases that saves a lot of time from entering zathura to view PDF files, sxiv for images and so on.
- it is much faster than bash. Without turned off unused extensions it starts faster, runs faster, completes faster. Each dozen of milliseconds are nice to spend not awaiting for many-bogomips powerful computer.
And there is separate killer must have plugin that I met firstly when using bash (it also works with zsh of course): Z directory jumper. It tracks each time you change directory and offers quick jumping to previously visited place identified by regular expression and directory visiting frequencies. And it works perfectly with autocd and autopushd.
zmv feature looks very promising and seems that it will replace another bunch of Perl/shell-scripts from my computer. However it requires some learning curve of course.