For some people, the terminal can be scary. But a terminal is more than just a black screen to type in. It usually runs a shell, so called because it wraps around the kernel. The shell is a text-based interface that lets you run commands on the system. It’s also sometimes called a command line interpreter or CLI. Fedora, like most Linux distributions, comes with bash as the default shell. However, it isn’t the only shell available; several other shells can be installed. This article focuses on the Z Shell, or zsh.
Bash is a rewrite of the old Bourne shell (sh) that shipped in UNIX. Zsh is intended to be friendlier than bash, through better interaction. Some of its useful features are:
- Programmable command line completion
- Shared command history between running shell sessions
- Spelling correction
- Loadable modules
- Interactive selection of files and folders
Zsh is available in the Fedora repositories. To install, run this command:
$ sudo dnf install zsh
Using zsh
To start using it, just type zsh and the new shell prompts you with a first run wizard. This wizard helps you configure initial features, like history behavior and auto-completion. Or you can opt to keep the rc file empty:
First-run wizard
If you type 1 the configuration wizard starts. The other options launch the shell immediately.
Note that the user prompt is % and not $ as with bash. A significant feature here is the auto-completion that allows you to move among files and directories with the Tab key, much like a menu:
Using the auto-completion feature with the cd command
Another interesting feature is spelling correction, which helps when writing filenames with mixed cases:
Auto completion performing spelling correction
Making zsh your default shell
Zsh offers a lot of plugins, like zsh-syntax-highlighting, and the famous “Oh my zsh” (check out its page here). You might want to make it the default, so it runs whenever you start a session or open a terminal. To do this, use the chsh (“change shell”) command:
$ chsh -s $(which zsh)
This command tells your system that you want to set (-s) your default shell to the correct location of the shell (which zsh).
Photo by Kate Ter Haar from Flickr (CC BY-SA).