ZSHROADMAP(1)                        General Commands Manual                        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 indi‐
       cates 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  administrator  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 Configuration Functions in zshcontrib(1).

INTERACTIVE USE
       Interaction  with  the  shell uses the builtin Zsh Line Editor, 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 substantially 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 oper‐
       ating 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 COMBINING_CHARS needs to be set.  Because the shell is now more sensi‐
       tive to the definition of the character set, note 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 operation) or LC_CTYPE (to affect only the  handling  of
       character sets) is set to an appropriate value.  This is true even if you are using a sin‐
       gle-byte character set including 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  com‐
       pletions.

       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 com‐
       mands; it is therefore to be preferred.

       The completion system must be enabled explicitly when the shell starts.  For more informa‐
       tion see zshcompsys(1).

   Extending the line editor
       Apart  from  completion, the line editor is highly extensible 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 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 zshoptions(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 reasons as `glob‐
       bing') and for use when programming.  These are described in the section `Filename Genera‐
       tion' in zshexpn(1).

       Of particular interest are the following patterns that are not commonly supported by other
       systems of pattern matching:

       **     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 zshmisc(1).

       One commonly encountered difference is that variables substituted 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 Parameters' in zshparam(1).

PROGRAMMING
       The most convenient way of adding enhancements to the shell  is  typically  by  writing  a
       shell function and arranging for it to be autoloaded.  Functions are described in the sec‐
       tion `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 argument substitution, only
       simple text replacement.

       A few general functions, other than those for the line editor described  above,  are  pro‐
       vided 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 graphical 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 patterns.



zsh 5.0.7                                October 7, 2014                            ZSHROADMAP(1)