Oh My Zsh. OMG!

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Oh my God. How did I not find out about oh-my-zsh till now? Here is a 10 minute installation guide to pimp out your shell. You are already on zsh, right?

Installation

Use curl to install automatically in one step. Run the following from the home folder. This clones the oh-my-zsh git repo to the default location ~/.oh-my-zsh.

curl -L http://install.ohmyz.sh | sh

If this is the first time installing using oh-my-zsh, the install script creates a ~/.zshrc file and copies over some information (path and aliases) to it. If it did not, copy an existing template to your home folder.

cp ~/.oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc

It is time to change your shell to zsh if you haven’t done it already

chsh -s /bin/zsh

Open a new terminal window/tab and your prompt should look like this. Now change to a git directory and see the prompt change automatically.

Customization

The above prompt is made possible by the default theme “robbyrussell” that is loaded at the start of each session. This can be customized a lot to make it look any way you want.

Choose ZSH_THEME="random" in your ~/.zshrc (usually at the top of the file) and a different theme is loaded each time a new terminal session is loaded. You can look at all the existing themes this way till you find the one you like.

To customize your prompt and not use an existing theme, create a file name ending in .zsh-theme under ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes and it will be sourced each time a new session is started.

For example create a file ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/[name-of-theme].zsh-theme then add an entry ZSH_THEME="[name-of-theme]" to ~/.zshrc and comment out the default theme. The following are the contents of my personal theme (95% of which is taken from an existing theme called ‘ys’)

function box_name {
    [ -f ~/.box-name ] && cat ~/.box-name || echo $HOST
}

# Directory info.
local current_dir='${PWD/#$HOME/~}'

# Git info.
local git_info='$(git_prompt_info)'
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_PREFIX=" %{$fg[white]%}on%{$reset_color%} git:%{$fg[cyan]%}"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_SUFFIX="%{$reset_color%}"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY=" %{$fg[red]%}x"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_CLEAN=" %{$fg[green]%}o"

# Prompt format: \n # USER at MACHINE in DIRECTORY on git:BRANCH STATE [TIME] \n $ 
PROMPT="
%{$terminfo[bold]$fg[blue]%}#%{$reset_color%} \
%{$fg[cyan]%}%n \
%{$fg[white]%}at \
%{$fg[green]%}$(box_name) \
%{$fg[white]%}in \
%{$terminfo[bold]$fg[yellow]%}${current_dir}%{$reset_color%}\
${git_info} \
%{$fg[white]%}
%{$terminfo[bold]$fg[red]%}$ %{$reset_color%}"

if [[ "$USER" == "root" ]]; then
PROMPT="
%{$terminfo[bold]$fg[blue]%}#%{$reset_color%} \
%{$bg[yellow]%}%{$fg[cyan]%}%n%{$reset_color%} \
%{$fg[white]%}at \
%{$fg[green]%}$(box_name) \
%{$fg[white]%}in \
%{$terminfo[bold]$fg[yellow]%}${current_dir}%{$reset_color%}\
${git_info} \
%{$fg[white]%}[%*]
%{$terminfo[bold]$fg[red]%}$ %{$reset_color%}"
fi

This makes my prompt look like this:

Plugins

There are number of plugins available. I have added the following to my ~/.zshrc. My favorite ones are sublime, sudo and web-search (git comes with the default installation)

plugins=(git git-flow github git-extras ruby node npm sublime theme sbt scala mvn ssh-agent sudo web-search zsh-syntax-highlighting)

I prefer to have all my aliases and functions in separate files so that they can be sourced by both bash and zsh (in case I decide to fall back to bash). For aliases, I just source all my aliases at the end of my ~/.zshrc.

source $HOME/.aliases

For functions however, I had to add a new file to ~/.oh-my-zsh/lib folder. The name did not really matter, but it has to have an extenstion of .zsh. All files with that extension are sourced automatically. Once this file is added, I added this entry to ~/.oh-my-zsh/.gitignore to keep the repo clean.

Upgrade

By default you will be prompted to check for upgrades. If you would like oh-my-zsh to automatically upgrade itself without prompting you, set the following in your ~/.zshrc:

DISABLE_UPDATE_PROMPT=true

To disable upgrades entirely, set the following in your ~/.zshrc:

DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE=true

To upgrade directly from the command-line, just run upgrade_oh_my_zsh.

Uninstalling

Run uninstall_oh_my_zsh, (which is conveniently in your path) from the command-line and it’ll remove itself and revert you to bash (or your previous zsh configuration). You might have to run chsh to change your shell back to bash.