zsh

3 Articles

Linux Fu: A Warp Speed Prompt

March 20, 2025 by 26 Comments

If you spend a lot of time at the command line, you probably have either a very basic prompt or a complex, information-dense prompt. If you are in the former camp, or you just want to improve your shell prompt, have a look at Starship. It works on the most common shells on most operating systems, so you can use it everywhere you go, within reason. It has the advantage of being fast and you can also customize it all that you want.

What Does It Look Like?

It is hard to explain exactly what the Starship prompt looks like. First, you can customize it almost infinitely, so there’s that. Second, it adapts depending on where you are. So, for example, in a git-controlled directory, you get info about the git status unless you’ve turned that off. If you are in an ssh session, you’ll see different info than if you are logged in locally.

However, here’s a little animation from their site that will give you an idea of what you might expect: Continue reading “Linux Fu: A Warp Speed Prompt” →

Optimizing Your Linux Shell Experience

December 22, 2024 by 33 Comments

Are you familiar with Huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way, in that the most-used letters are the shortest. [Matheus Richard] had the same idea for optimizing your workflow in the Linux shell. The idea is to measure what commands you use the most and make them shorter.

Continue reading “Optimizing Your Linux Shell Experience” →

Linux Fu: Alternative Shells

May 21, 2020 by 38 Comments

On Unix — the progenitor of Linux — there was /bin/sh. It was simple, by comparison to today’s shells, but it allowed you to enter commands and — most importantly — execute lists of commands. In fact, it was a simple programming language that could make decisions, loop, and do other things to allow you to write scripts that were more than just a list of programs to run. However, it wasn’t always the easiest thing to use, so in true Unix fashion, people started writing new shells. In this post, I want to point out a few shells other than the ubiquitous bash, which is one of the successors to the old sh program.

Since the 7th Edition of Unix, sh was actually the Bourne shell, named after its author, Stephen Bourne. It replaced the older Thompson shell written in 1971. That shell had some resemblance to a modern shell, but wasn’t really set up for scripting. It did have the standard syntax for redirection and piping, though. The PWB shell was also an early contender to replace Thompson, but all of those shells have pretty much disappeared.

You probably use bash and, honestly, you’ll probably continue to use bash after reading this post. But there are a few alternatives and for some people, they are worth considering. Also, there are a few special-purpose shells you may very well encounter even if your primary shell is bash.

Continue reading “Linux Fu: Alternative Shells” →