Zsh or Z Shell is an extended version of Bourne Again Shell (bash) and designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language.
Many of features from other shell were incorporated into zsh and many new features were added.
Comparing to bash, zsh has more features such as:
- Auto-completion (type command and click tab)
- Command option display (type command followed with – and click tab)
- Typing error correction
- Color highlighting
- Command-click URL
Installing
All popular Linux distro use bash as their default shell. To use zsh we must install and set the default shell to zsh. It’s very easy to install zsh because all of the popular distros have the zsh package on their repository.
Ubuntu based
# apt-get install zsh
Arch based
# pacman -S zsh
Centos/Redhat/Fedora
# dnf install zsh
Suse
# zipper install zsh
Enable zsh
After installation success, we need to enable zsh as default shell
$ chsh -s /bin/zsh
Log out and log in again and check if the active shell is zsh using the command below:
$ echo $0
Output of the command should be
/usr/bin/zsh