| |
man : zshroadmap(1)
ZSHROADMAP(1) ZSHROADMAP(1)
NAME
zshroadmap - informal introduction to the zsh manual
The Zsh Manual, like the shell itself, is large and often
complicated. This section of the manual provides some
pointers to areas of the shell that are likely to be of
particular interest to new users, and indicates where in
the rest of the manual the documentation is to be found.
WHEN THE SHELL STARTS
When it starts, the shell reads commands from various
files. These can be created or edited to customize the
shell. See the section Startup/Shutdown Files in zsh(1).
If no personal initialization files exist for the current
user, a function is run to help you change some of the
most common settings. It won't appear if your administra-
tor has disabled the zsh/newuser module. The function is
designed to be self-explanatory. You can run it by hand
with `autoload -Uz zsh-newuser-install;
zsh-newuser-install -f'. See also the section User Con-
figuration Functions in zshcontrib(1).
INTERACTIVE USE
Interaction with the shell uses the builtin Zsh Line Edi-
tor, ZLE. This is described in detail in zshzle(1).
The first decision a user must make is whether to use the
Emacs or Vi editing mode as the keys for editing are sub-
stantially different. Emacs editing mode is probably more
natural for beginners and can be selected explicitly with
the command bindkey -e.
A history mechanism for retrieving previously typed lines
(most simply with the Up or Down arrow keys) is available;
note that, unlike other shells, zsh will not save these
lines when the shell exits unless you set appropriate
variables, and the number of history lines retained by
default is quite small (30 lines). See the description of
the shell variables (referred to in the documentation as
parameters) HISTFILE, HISTSIZE and SAVEHIST in zsh-
param(1).
The shell now supports the UTF-8 character set (and also
others if supported by the operating system). This is
(mostly) handled transparently by the shell, but the
degree of support in terminal emulators is variable.
There is some discussion of this in the shell FAQ,
http://zsh.dotsrc.org/FAQ/ . Note in particular that for
combining characters to be handled the option COMBIN-
ING_CHARS needs to be set. Because the shell is now more
sensitive to the definition of the character set, note
zsh 4.3.10 June 1, 2009 1
ZSHROADMAP(1) ZSHROADMAP(1)
that if you are upgrading from an older version of the
shell you should ensure that the appropriate variable,
either LANG (to affect all aspects of the shell's opera-
tion) or LC_CTYPE (to affect only the handling of charac-
ter sets) is set to an appropriate value. This is true
even if you are using a single-byte character set includ-
ing extensions of ASCII such as ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15.
See the description of LC_CTYPE in zshparam(1).
Completion
Completion is a feature present in many shells. It allows
the user to type only a part (usually the prefix) of a
word and have the shell fill in the rest. The completion
system in zsh is programmable. For example, the shell can
be set to complete email addresses in arguments to the
mail command from your ~/.abook/addressbook; usernames,
hostnames, and even remote paths in arguments to scp, and
so on. Anything that can be written in or glued together
with zsh can be the source of what the line editor offers
as possible completions.
Zsh has two completion systems, an old, so called compctl
completion (named after the builtin command that serves as
its complete and only user interface), and a new one,
referred to as compsys, organized as library of builtin
and user-defined functions. The two systems differ in
their interface for specifying the completion behavior.
The new system is more customizable and is supplied with
completions for many commonly used commands; it is there-
fore to be preferred.
The completion system must be enabled explicitly when the
shell starts. For more information see zshcompsys(1).
Extending the line editor
Apart from completion, the line editor is highly extensi-
ble by means of shell functions. Some useful functions
are provided with the shell; they provide facilities such
as:
insert-composed-char
composing characters not found on the keyboard
match-words-by-style
configuring what the line editor considers a word
when moving or deleting by word
history-beginning-search-backward-end, etc.
alternative ways of searching the shell history
replace-string, replace-pattern
functions for replacing strings or patterns
zsh 4.3.10 June 1, 2009 2
ZSHROADMAP(1) ZSHROADMAP(1)
globally in the command line
edit-command-line
edit the command line with an external editor.
See the section `ZLE Functions' in zshcontrib(1) for
descriptions of these.
OPTIONS
The shell has a large number of options for changing its
behaviour. These cover all aspects of the shell; browsing
the full documentation is the only good way to become
acquainted with the many possibilities. See zshop-
tions(1).
PATTERN MATCHING
The shell has a rich set of patterns which are available
for file matching (described in the documentation as
`filename generation' and also known for historical rea-
sons as `globbing') and for use when programming. These
are described in the section `Filename Generation' in zsh-
expn(1).
Of particular interest are the following patterns that are
not commonly supported by other systems of pattern match-
ing:
** for matching over multiple directories
~, ^ the ability to exclude patterns from matching when
the EXTENDED_GLOB option is set
(...) glob qualifiers, included in parentheses at the end
of the pattern, which select files by type (such as
directories) or attribute (such as size).
GENERAL COMMENTS ON SYNTAX
Although the syntax of zsh is in ways similar to the Korn
shell, and therefore more remotely to the original UNIX
shell, the Bourne shell, its default behaviour does not
entirely correspond to those shells. General shell syntax
is introduced in the section `Shell Grammar' in zsh-
misc(1).
One commonly encountered difference is that variables sub-
stituted onto the command line are not split into words.
See the description of the shell option SH_WORD_SPLIT in
the section `Parameter Expansion' in zshexpn(1). In zsh,
you can either explicitly request the splitting (e.g.
${=foo}) or use an array when you want a variable to
expand to more than one word. See the section `Array
zsh 4.3.10 June 1, 2009 3
ZSHROADMAP(1) ZSHROADMAP(1)
Parameters' in zshparam(1).
PROGRAMMING
The most convenient way of adding enhancements to the
shell is typically by writing a shell function and arrang-
ing for it to be autoloaded. Functions are described in
the section `Functions' in zshmisc(1). Users changing
from the C shell and its relatives should notice that
aliases are less used in zsh as they don't perform argu-
ment substitution, only simple text replacement.
A few general functions, other than those for the line
editor described above, are provided with the shell and
are described in zshcontrib(1). Features include:
promptinit
a prompt theme system for changing prompts easily,
see the section `Prompt Themes'
zsh-mime-setup
a MIME-handling system which dispatches commands
according to the suffix of a file as done by graph-
ical file managers
zcalc a calculator
zargs a version of xargs that makes the find command
redundant
zmv a command for renaming files by means of shell pat-
terns.
zsh 4.3.10 June 1, 2009 4
|
